Photograph of bargain hunters' fight was a hoax

Frantic shoppers flooded a Madrid branch of department store El Corte Inglés on Friday, in an effort to grab the best deals on the first day of the winter sales. Emotions overran somewhat, as two shoppers grappled with each other on their way through the door... This was how the EL PAÍS English edition opened its front-page photostory in Saturday's edition, but, it turns out that the incident was staged and the redhead and the blonde supposedly grappling with each other to reach their chosen bargain first were in fact actresses.

In her own blog, a no-doubt highly satisfied Yolanda Domínguez explained how she had prepared the "scene" for two months, with the two actresses, a photographer and herself. "I had wanted to do something on the topic of female rivalry for some time, and I didn't know quite how to do it," Domínguez wrote.

"I thought that a line was a place where there is a degree of competitiveness, implicitly if not explicitly. And the most famous line is that one," she added in reference to the El Corte Inglés store on Madrid's Preciados street the day after the Three Kings holiday, when the sales begin in earnest.

"One woman plays the role of the tall, good-looking, young and successful woman (with all the ingredients to be rejected by the rest) and the other is somewhat older and badmouths the first for having stolen her job. The two women exchange insults and threats making everyone waiting in the line participants in the story."