onalia bueno mogan mayor salary

Mogán mayor says her €65,000 salary is too low

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Mogán mayor says her €65,802 salary is too low

Onalia Bueno believes she is paid too little for what she does for her municipality. The mayor of Mogán — now back in the orbit of the PP, the party that expelled her in 2007 after the Góndola case erupted — considers the €65,802.15 she receives as her gross annual salary to be insufficient. It is the maximum figure allowed under the Law on the Foundations of Local Government for mayors of municipalities with between 20,001 and 50,000 inhabitants. Mogán has 21,172 registered residents, according to the latest data from the National Statistics Institute (INE).

“I take home €3,100 a month net, the same as a receptionist in a four-star hotel, and I am on duty 365 days a year, 24 hours a day,” Bueno said recently in a relaxed interview on the Helado Oscuro podcast, which has had wide repercussions on social media in recent days. In that conversation, the mayor of Mogán argues that politicians should receive, in addition to their salary, a bonus for meeting targets, “like any executive in a private company”. “I would wipe the floor with anyone else in my conditions,” says the mayor, who boasts of having turned Mogán into an envied municipality, a “mirror” for others. “It doesn’t seem fair to me given the time dedicated,” Bueno adds regarding her pay and her dedication to the role, which she compares with that of a Member of the European Parliament, “who earns €12,000 or €13,000 a month and is useless”.

A different tune seven years ago

Seven years ago, however, the already then mayor of Mogán was singing a different tune. “I don’t need the €2,700 I earn at the council, because I earn that myself with four rental properties,” she retorted to the opposition at a full council meeting held at the end of March 2019, in the final stretch of her first term. “I’m here out of vocation and to perform a public service. I don’t need politics to live,” she said at the time. Bueno made those remarks at a full council meeting debating the compatibility of her role as mayor with her activity as administrator of the private company Ernesto Fernández Morales, which is dedicated to renting out real estate. During that session, the mayor justified the company’s movements — which in 2017 had registered a capital increase of €120,000 — by maintaining that the funds came from a donation of land made by her father, Guillermo Bueno, who was also mayor. The opposition (NC and the PP) denounced at the time that these rental incomes did not appear in the mayor’s mandatory asset declarations, and barely three months later (June 2019) she resigned as sole administrator of the company and handed formal representation to her father. Bueno, however, remains an authorised representative and still holds 100% of the shares in that company, which has interests in the municipality.

Always at the maximum legal salary

Despite that rhetoric appealing to vocation and public service, and an apparent lack of interest in her financial conditions, Bueno’s track record shows that she has always taken the maximum legal salary for mayors of municipalities in her population bracket. In her first two terms, her pay was around €53,000 gross a year. At that time, Mogán had fewer than 20,000 inhabitants and therefore fell into a lower bracket. By 2023, it had surpassed that figure. And the mayor did not miss the opportunity. After winning the elections again with an absolute majority, she brought a rise of nearly €11,000 to the first full council meeting of the new term, taking her salary to €63,888.61. At the end of December 2024 she applied a further increase that brought her annual pay to the current €65,802.15.

The mayor of Mogán has also charged the municipal coffers €40,000 for her defence in the Góndola case, in which she was acquitted. She was also investigated over an alleged postal vote-buying scheme in the 2015 and 2019 elections. The judge shelved that case in 2022, citing the statute of limitations in one case and a lack of evidence in the other.

The hotel receptionist comparison

There is another detail about Bueno’s salary that has not gone unnoticed on social media. The mayor of Mogán compared her net monthly income with that of “a four-star hotel receptionist”. That is not true. The hospitality collective agreement for the province of Las Palmas sets a base salary of between €1,600 and €1,700 gross a month in 14 payments for this professional profile, not counting seniority and bonuses. In total, around €23,000 a year.

A mayor who is ‘different’

In the Helado Oscuro podcast interview, Bueno described herself as a “different” mayor who makes her municipality “progress continuously”. “Many (mayors) keep civil servant hours and by two o’clock they’re off on their bikes. I run out of hours in the day. I signed up to the gym with a friend and had to give it up; now I have an exercise bike and weights,” says Bueno. And she adds: “I’m not complaining, because a labour of love is no burden.”

Bueno has recounted that she began studying Political Science and Sociology at the University of Deusto in Bilbao, where she coincided with the current Vox leader, Santiago Abascal, who was then a member of the PP’s New Generations. “He was surrounded by bodyguards. There were about 60 of us in the class. We (she and her friends) sat at the back and he sat in the middle. There were abertzales, kale borroka, and (Abascal) always had the balls needed to stand up to them. And that is to be admired… For me that is not the far right; you have to face a polarised society where your life is in danger,” she said. “You don’t have to be afraid of Vox. They are normal people who believe in their cause, who have people who support them, who don’t have horns or a tail,” says the mayor of Mogán, who by contrast refers to the parties to the left of the PSOE as “the nutters of the far left” or “the communists”, and who believes that municipalities “don’t have an ideology”.

Bueno says she identifies with “the PSOE of Felipe González”, with whom, in her view, Spain “began to take off”. She accuses the current party, led by Pedro Sánchez, of “polarising, of making people more ignorant when talking about politics” and of “political clientelism” for introducing “the handout system”. “I can’t support you sitting on your backside at home for years because you get the Minimum Living Income. You have hands and legs to work at whatever you want or can,” said the controversial southern mayor, ignoring the fact that, according to the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AiRef), the IMV reaches fewer than half the households that need it. Bueno, by contrast, prefers to talk about families who, according to her, live off benefits while having “an iPhone and a tablet” at home, paying with a “revolving card” and doing “the odd odd job” to top up their income. The mayor contrasts that model with that of the person who “gets up, makes sacrifices and at the end of the day has the satisfaction of having done their job well”.

Alliance with the PP and ambitions for 2027

The mayor will stand in the local and regional elections of May 2027 under her own banner, Bueno para Gran Canaria, in alliance with the PP. She will run again as a candidate for mayor of Mogán and will be number two on the PP list for the island council (Cabildo). “I want to grow politically. That’s why I’m aligning myself with the PP,” the party that expelled her in 2007 after she was charged in the Góndola case of alleged corruption. Bueno says she has a “measured ambition” and that she is ready for a possible future candidacy to preside over the Government of the Canary Islands. “I’d love it, I’m prepared, but now is not the moment.”

With her return to the PP, the mayor of Mogán has left behind her period as an ally of Coalición Canaria (CC) and her dalliances with Primero Canarias, the party that emerged from a split in Nueva Canarias (NC) and is led by Teodoro Sosa and Óscar Hernández. According to Bueno, since 2016 she has maintained “a special relationship” with Fernando Clavijo (CC), whom she describes as “the best president in the history of the Canary Islands”. The mayor even joined the nationalist party’s organisational structure as secretary for municipal policies. However, she says, that bond fractured when CC’s leadership prioritised an understanding with Primero Canarias. “I took it badly because loyalty is important to me… I already told (Clavijo) that we would see each other in May 2027, to see whether his bet was a success or a failure.”

Bueno has said that she held talks with the mayor of Gáldar about taking part in a municipalist alliance in Gran Canaria. She looked favourably on Teodoro Sosa being the candidate for the Cabildo of Gran Canaria. However, she attributes to Óscar Hernández, her counterpart in Agüimes, the veto on her joining Primero Canarias. “They think I’m a danger as a leader. They don’t want anyone, and least of all a woman, who could overshadow them,” she says in explaining why that relationship never came together.

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