Inside Spain: Kicking Franco's head and a ban on splitting the bill

Spain's fierce passion for football took an unexpected turn this week as two teams faced off playing with an unusual ball: an artistic reproduction of former dictator Francisco Franco's head.

The "La Copa del Generalísimo" performance, subversively taking the name of a tournament played during Franco's iron grip on the country from 1939 to 1975, comes as Spain marks the 50th anniversary of his death.

The experimental "Ex Abrupto" art festival pitted two teams against each other for a self-styled "anti-fascist fixture" in Moia, around 50 kilometres (31 miles) north of Barcelona.

The choice of pitch was also highly symbolic, close to former trenches used by the defeated republican side in the 1936-1939 civil war that brought Franco to power after his coup.

The recreated hyper-realistic head was fashioned by the Indecline group and Eugenio Merino, an artist whose work has tackled Franco and the right-wing dictatorship on several occasions.

He attracted attention more than a decade ago with "Always Franco", a life-sized representation of the general in a refrigerator that sparked an uproar at Madrid's ARCO art festival in 2012.

Merino courted controversy again with "Punching Franco", a work that used the dictator's head as a punching ball.

The Francisco Franco Foundation, which works to promote the late dictator's legacy, lodged complaints against both works that were rejected by the courts.

Merino used the same mould for the resin and silicone-covered head which was the protagonist of Thursday's match.

"It's the 50th anniversary of Franco's death and I thought it was necessary to commemorate it," Merino told local radio RAC 1.

"We recover that idea of the people that play and enjoy, and we also recover the idea of anti-fascism."

The game, which only allowed limited spectator numbers, was recorded for broadcast on Friday and Saturday in a bar in Moia, while the head can be visited in a local museum.

Merino and Indecline had already teamed up to send political messages, using the recreated head of Donald Trump to play football at the wall on the US-Mexico border and one of Brazil's rightist former president Jair Bolsonaro.

In other news, a growing number of cafes, bars and restaurants in Spain are refusing to split the bills for customers.

In other words, when it comes to asking for la cuenta when you’ve just had drinks or a meal with friends or family, more and more waiters are saying it’s not up to them to do the maths but rather for one customer to pay and for the others to pay him or her back.

There are no official figures yet but Spanish news outlets have recently been covering that this is happening.

Spanish TV channel La Sexta revealed that the stand against splitting the bill is spreading throughout Málaga’s hospitality industry, as waiters say it takes too long for them to divide the bill for each customer and carry out all the payments, delaying their daily tasks in the process.

There’s also evidence of eateries in Barcelona and Zaragoza standing against this practice.

The bigger the group, the bigger the headache, especially if there are customers who are penny pinchers and only want to pay for what they had, meaning that it’s not just a case of dividing the bill by the number of customers. Furthermore, it’s then up to the waiter to make sure that all the payments add up to what’s owed in total.

Spanish consumer watchdog Facua says that it's not yet a widespread practice yet but that bar and restaurant owners are within their rights to refuse to accept split payments as long as they forewarn customers or have a sign up pointing this out.

Nevertheless, none of this is specifically spelled out in Spanish law, which makes it a bit of a grey area.

According to Spanish lawyer Xabi Abat, bar and restaurant owners are even within their rights to charge an extra fee for split bills as long as this is previously signposted, and some are already charging €1 or €2 per customer for this.

So there you have it, eating out with friends and family is extremely common in Spain, and this matter is likely to come up sooner or later for you.

Can you imagine how complicated splitting the bill can become if you factor in tipping?

READ ALSO: What are the rules on tipping in Spain?

Luckily, Spaniards aren’t big tippers, otherwise this would be an even bigger quebradero de cabeza (‘headache’ in the figurative sense).

With additional reporting by AFP.