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Four decades ago this week, on 20 July 1984, the first ever edition of SUR in English was distributed among the English-speaking community on the Costa del Sol.
That 16-page newspaper with a mixture of international and local news set out to meet a growing need on the Costa del Sol: new residents and property owners, many of them British, lacked information in their own language.
The Costa del Sol of the 1980s was very different to the one of 2024. Some may find it hard now to imagine a world without internet, when information was not immediately available at the click of a mouse or a swipe of a touchscreen. Newspapers from the UK and other countries could take a day or two to reach newsagents in the south of Spain and not every home had a telephone.
At the end of 1983, directors and staff at the daily newspaper for Malaga province, Diario SUR, were already working on the idea of filling that gap in the market with a publication aimed at foreign residents and visitors.
Meanwhile SUR was approached by a Welsh couple resident on the Costa del Sol, Joan and Gerry Davies, who shared a similar idea, and the partnership was welded, SUR’s own Pedro Luis Gómez overseeing the publication as the first editor, before Liz Parry took over a couple of years later.
Over the years SUR in English has been a pioneer in a number of ways. SUR in English became the first ‘freesheet’ format newspaper in Spain funded entirely by advertising revenue, a model that was typical in the UK at the time, but not in this country.
And SUR in English soon became the first newspaper to have a stand at international tourism and property fairs such as the World Travel Market in London to promote Andalucía and the Costa del Sol.
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Being part of the SUR family has set SUR in English apart from other foreign-language publications in Spain. The editorial content comes from the large team of Spanish journalists in the SUR newsroom, a pool of professionals that grew as publisher Prensa Malagueña became part of what is now the Spain-wide media group Vocento. With 17 regional titles around the country and one national newspaper (ABC), the group boasts a large central newsroom in Madrid as well as correspondents around the globe.
And back on a local level, SUR in English also has its essential team of English-speaking reporters, seeking out stories and faces from the local international community, that is to say, SUR in English readers.
All this gives readers the guarantee that the information contained in the pages of this newspaper comes from reliable sources, something that is so important in the 21st-century world of social media.
Technological advances have rapidly changed the way people receive and read the news and over forty years SUR in English has seen continual changes.
One important year in the newspaper’s history was 1996, when the website surinenglish.com was born. This existed almost in the background for the following decade while the weekly print edition of the newspaper continued to break its own records. Now surinenglish.com is reaching tens of thousands of readers around the globe every day, the perfect complement to the print edition.
So all of this deserves a celebration and that is what SUR in English has in store for the coming months, looking back, but also looking forwards.
The new 40 years logo launched in this edition looks to the future with a modern, linked design that represents the newspaper’s role in ‘linking communities’, equipping foreign residents to better understand the country they have chosen to live in or visit.
The year’s events will include a gala evening in Marbella this autumn which will be a celebration of pioneers on the Costa del Sol. The coming months will also see special supplements, cultural events and forums on issues affecting SUR in English readers.
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