A simple geography trivia question about the Canary Islands' coastline has turned the municipal bureaucracy of southern Gran Canaria upside down. It all began in July 2022, when a hundred applicants sat down to take the multiple-choice exam to fill fourteen positions in the Mogán Local Police. Among the questions on the questionnaire was number 47, supposedly designed to gauge the future officers' territorial knowledge: knowing exactly how many beaches dot the municipality's coastline.
The official answer key stated that the correct answer was nineteen sandy beaches. However, a tenacious candidate, Juan Ulises Santana Suárez, decided to consult local guides, a map, and compare the official figure with the geographical reality of the area. To his surprise, adding up every coastal spot—from Amadores to Veneguera, passing through Patalavaca, Tauro, Taurito, and Arguineguín—the actual count yielded a total of 21 sandy beaches. None of the options offered by the examining board matched the correct number, turning the question into an insurmountable trap born from a jumble of administrative figures.
The applicant filed an immediate appeal demanding the annulment of the problematic question, but the examining board chose to ignore it and dismissed the claim. Far from giving up, the candidate took the case to the ordinary courts, beginning a long legal journey that has culminated four years later. The Court of First Instance of Las Palmas has issued a decisive ruling in favor of the plaintiff, striking down the test question and ordering the entire selection process to be restarted and the test re-evaluated without considering the mystery of the beaches.
The court ruling now opens up a curious bureaucratic scenario. On the one hand, the local administration must urgently convene the old examination board to re-grade the exams, eliminating the fateful question number 47. On the other hand, Supreme Court jurisprudence comes to the rescue, applying the doctrine of third parties acting in good faith, thus guaranteeing that the officers who passed the exams, wore the uniform, and are now career civil servants will not lose their jobs due to a geographical miscalculation made half a decade ago. A curious legal lesson that demonstrates that, in municipal bureaucracy, miscounting beaches can be very costly.
