User:Edserb/sandbox

Sant Esteve de les Roures is an imaginary town created by mistake by the Guardia Civil in Spain in 2018, [3] and which in only a few days became a viral phenomenon on the Internet.

After the referendum in Catalonia on October 1 and the 21st of December elections, the Civil Guard sent to the judge of the Supreme Court, Pablo Llarena, a report with 315 acts of alleged violence or aggression against the Spanish police forces in Catalonia. [5] According to this report to which the Madrid newspaper El Mundo had access, the most violent episodes had occurred in Sant Esteve de les Roures, a town which does not exist. The report specifies that: "One of the demonstrators who had already attacked other agents, took advantage of a fallen agent, who was totally defenseless, and gave the agent a brutal kick to the back of his head. In the same place, the rider of a motorcycle tried to run over a police officer and steal the his regulation weapon. [6]

This case was compared to what happened in the non-existent town of Arralde, in the Basque Country, where Judge Baltasar Garzón ordered police forces to prevent an act in favor of Basque political prisoners. [7]

The fact that a nonexistent town contained in an official report of the Civil Guard caused jokes in some social networks, parody Twitter profiles for administrations, political parties and organizations of the town, such as the city council, the university [8] and schools and a local Guardia Civil police force. In April, the official profile of the Guardia Civil on Twitter responded to the profile that parodied the Sant Esteve de les Roures town hall while retracting itself from impartiality in a tweet. [9] [10]

In April 2018, the fictitious town already had more than eighty organizations on Twitter. [11]