Jon Clarke is a Londoner who worked at the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday as an investigative journalist before moving to Spain in 2003 where he helped set up the Olive Press.
After studying Geography at Manchester University he fell in love with Spain during a two-year stint teaching English in Madrid.
On returning to London, he studied journalism and landed his first job at the weekly Informer newspaper in Teddington, covering hundreds of stories in areas including Hounslow, Richmond and Harrow.
This led on to work at the Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Mirror, Standard and even the Sun, before he landed his first full time job at the Daily Mail.
After a year on the Newsdesk he worked as a Showbiz correspondent covering mostly music, including the rise of the Spice Girls, the rivalry between Oasis and Blur and interviewed many famous musicians such as Joe Strummer and Ray Manzarak, as well as Peter Gabriel and Bjorn from Abba on his own private island.
After a year as the News Editor at the UK’s largest-selling magazine Now, he returned to work as an investigative journalist in Features at the Mail on Sunday.
As well as tracking down Jimi Hendrix’ sole living heir in Sweden, while there he also helped lead the initial investigation into Prince Andrew’s seedy links to Jeffrey Epstein during three trips to America.
He had dozens of exclusive stories, while his travel writing took him to Jamaica, Brazil and Belarus.
He is the author of three books; Costa Killer, Dining Secrets of Andalucia and My Search for Madeleine.
Contact jon@theolivepress.es
Jon Clarke (Publisher & Editor)
I speak as an experienced cyclist – this is a recipe for accidents.
In Germany in many cities, pavements or half the pavements are clearly delineated for cyclists, that’s fine there because 99% of people obey the law. Try going the wrong way down a one way street and see the reaction.
In the Netherlands they have had ‘fietspads’ for generations. These are specifically for cycles and bromfiets/mopeds, complete with their own set of traffic lights but these are two sensible countries.
The caption photo is incorrect. It shows a proper bicycle lane, and not a pavement (notice white marker lines). As for Spain’s laws and the way they are chosen, you may as well ask monkeys to make it up. In Spain the “bicyle lanes” are frequently part of the existing pavement with a line painted on one side lol.
This law will soon be changed once floods of accidents and legal claims start arriving. A pavement is designed for pedestrians – Spain can’t even work that work out. Duh.
I cannot beleive this!!
My bike rental shop in Torremolinos, was closed down in June because the local council decided that it did not want bikes on the Paseo (very wide). They claimed that people could not even push the bikes from the shop.
We informed them that European law states that there is no law against cycling on paths but they just kept threatening us with more and more fines.
The really stupid thing is that they are planning on putting cycle paths on the beach. Yes, ON the beach!! Now that is a recipe for disaster
We have an apatment in Spain on a community, as we live on the third floor and there is no lift we requested at our annual community meeting that cycle racks were made available in the car park. This was refused and we were told we could not park our bikes in the car park but had to carry them up the three flights of stairs each time we used them. We are both in our sixties, my husband has a hernia and I have a bad hip. We are thoroughly disappointed with the decision and it means we may have to get rid of our bikes. We were using bike locks to attach them securely to the railings in the car park but we were told no, we had to carry them upstairs. The stairs are tiled , go round corners and if we fell we would be seriously injured. Is there any advice you can give to us to solve our problem? Please help…