The City Council of Granadilla de Abona (southern Tenerife) has hired the tiktoker Miguel Assal to give a talk on October 31 in which he will teach “in a dynamic, close, and practical way how to react when every second counts,” according to the local corporation itself. Assal —“one of the most recognized emergency and first aid communicators in Spain,” according to the presentation by the Tenerife City Council— is a 45-year-old from Santander, a SAMU (Emergency Medical Service) agent, and has 3.7 million followers just on TikTok.
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In June 2025, he appeared on the podcast The Wild Project, one of the most viewed in Spain, hosted by Jordi Wild. During the program, Assal confessed that, during his eight years as a lifeguard on a beach in La Manga —Murcia—, he did not mark a sector with currents to become a “hero” by rescuing women who got lost. “We wanted the girls to enter [those areas],” he says smiling. “We had to mark it; sometimes we didn’t mark it to look for that… 20 years, 19, dude, crazy,” he recounted amid laughter from both interviewer and interviewee.
This newspaper has contacted both the City Council and Miguel Assal himself, but has received no response. The technician has also made no statements on the matter since his June 2025 comments. This controversy, in any case, does not seem to have affected his career at all: Assal frequently tours cities throughout Spain to talk about rescue in emergency situations.
Granadilla de Abona has been governed since March 2025 by the alliance between Coalición Canaria (the party to which Mayor José Domingo Regalado belongs), Partido Popular, and Vox, after a motion against the socialist mayor, Jennifer Miranda, succeeded. In early May, the municipality was under global scrutiny for several days for being the destination in Spain of the cruise ship MV Hondius, the vessel operated by Oceanwide Expeditions that transported three deceased from hantavirus and who disembarked at the local port.
In the video aired in June 2025, before starting to recount the anecdote during his interview with Jordi Wild, Assal warns with laughter that what he is going to tell may be controversial —his exact words were ‘what I’m going to tell you is kind of like that’—. He then describes a practice that, according to him, consisted of letting certain women enter a current and then intervening to rescue them. “It was a very easy current for rescues, but in the end, you looked like the hero,” he comments.
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In his explanation, he details that lifeguards controlled who accessed the unmarked area. According to him, they refrained from acting in some cases, such as minors, and chose certain bathers before entering the water. “Come on, not this one; not the child, no, no, no,” and we quickly went down so they wouldn’t get into the current. ‘Come on, these two, they’re fine, come on, let’s go”..
Assal insists these were simple interventions, as the current was perfectly identified and rescues were carried out at a short distance. Still, his statements provoked a quick reaction on social media after the interview excerpt was spread.
Among those who responded publicly was the Minister of Health, Mónica García, who criticized the episode in a message posted on X. She pointed out that a simple way to combat machismo is not to celebrate or laugh at behaviors that put women at risk with the aim of flirting.
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