Spain's national refrigeration and air conditioning centre has broken air conditioning

Spain's national reference centre for refrigeration and air conditioning has spent two months without air conditioning

The ironies of public administration: the National Reference Centre for Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Technologies (run by the Regional Government of Madrid) has had a broken air conditioning system for weeks and, according to internal sources, repairs will take two months. The irony does not end there: the centre's own staff have been photographed using hand fans to cope with the heat, an image already circulating on social media as a symbol of bureaucratic inefficiency.

A track record of system failures
This is not the first time the climate control has failed at this centre. Two years ago, during the winter, the heating system also broke down, as a former student recalled. The institution, which trains professionals in refrigeration and heating installations, cannot keep its own equipment running. Meanwhile, staff resort to makeshift methods: fans and patience.

Bureaucracy that doesn't cool
A two-month wait to fix the air conditioning at a centre that is supposed to be a national reference comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with the inner workings of the administration. Similar cases repeat themselves in other bodies, such as the State Secretariat for Telecommunications, which a few years ago asked citizens to send complaints by post because its digital system was not working. The gap between the modernisation rhetoric and reality on the ground is absolute.

As temperatures rise, the centre keeps taking on courses and students who are sweating buckets. The question is obvious: if they cannot maintain the cold, what exactly are they teaching?

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