The Granadilla de Abona City Council (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 of the Tenerife City Council— is a 45-year-old man from Santander, an agent of the SAMU (Emergency Medical Care Service) and has 3.7 million followers on TikTok alone.
In June 2025 he went to The Wild Project podcast, one of the most watched 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 an area with currents to become a “hero” by rescuing women who got lost. “We were looking for 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 old, 19, man, crazy," he said, laughing between the interviewer and the interviewee.
This newspaper has contacted both the City Council and Miguel Assal himself, although it has not received any response. The coach has not made any statement in this regard either since his statements in June 2025. This controversy, in any case, does not seem to have affected his career in the slightest: Assal carries out frequent tours of cities throughout Spain to talk about rescue in times of emergency.
Granadilla de Abona (58,750 inhabitants) has been governed since March 2025 by the alliance between the Canarian Coalition (a formation to which Mayor José Domingo Regalado belongs), the Popular Party and Vox, after a motion against the socialist mayor, Jennifer Miranda, was successful. At the beginning of May, the municipality was under global scrutiny for several days for being the destination in Spain of the MV Hondius cruise ship, the ship operated by Oceanwide Expeditions that was transporting three people who died from hantavirus and who disembarked in the town's port.
In the video broadcast in June 2025, before starting to tell the anecdote during his interview with Jordi Wild, Assal warns with a laugh that what he is going to tell may be controversial - his exact words were 'what I am going to tell you is a little like that'. She then describes a practice that, she explains, consisted of letting certain women enter a current and then intervening and rescuing them. “It was a very easy current to make rescues, but in the end you were the hero,” he comments.
In his explanation, he details that the lifeguards controlled who accessed the unmarked area. According to the story, they ruled out acting in some cases, such as that of minors, and chose certain bathers before jumping into the water. "Come on, not this one; not the child, no, no," and we went down quickly so that he wouldn't get into the current. 'Come on, these two, they're fine, come on, let's go there.'
Assal insists that these were simple interventions, since the current was perfectly identified and the rescues were carried out at a short distance. Even so, his statements provoked a rapid reaction on social networks after the fragment of the interview was broadcast.
