Spain will stick to its path of austerity in 2014 with the government due to approve its draft budget for the year on Friday, subjecting pensioners and public workers to more cutbacks despite a slowly improving economy.

A new pay freeze for civil servants and a pension reform which will stop indexing payouts to inflation are among the measures which Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's conservative government is expected to adopt.

EU inspectors assessed customs controls at Gibraltar's border with Spain on Wednesday, aiming to soothe a feud between London and Madrid over the territory.

Workers who habitually cross the border complained that the visit should have been unannounced to avoid window-dressing by the Spanish border guards they blame for long queues at the crossing.

Spain's 75-year-old King Juan Carlos recovered in hospital Wednesday after hip-replacement surgery but now faces yet another operation, feeding concerns over his future as head of state.

Doctors said he was in "highly satisfactory" condition after a surgeon fitted a temporary replacement for an implant that had got infected -- his eighth operation in just over three years.

Spain's King Juan Carlos arrived at a Madrid hospital on Tuesday for hip-replacement surgery, his eighth operation in just over three years.

"I am very well," the 75-year-old king, who has rejected talk of abdicating despite his ailment, told reporters, waving from his car window as he arrived at the private Quiron Hospital in the western suburbs of the capital.

Hospital budget cuts and new charges for medicine are blocking healthcare access to hundreds of thousands of people in Spain, including the seriously ill, a top health charity warned Tuesday.

Despite the government's recent claims that the economic crisis is easing, Medicos del Mundo said last year's spending cuts were hitting the most vulnerable people and raising health risks.

An EU team tasked to defuse a bitter feud between Spain and Britain over Gibraltar will center on tit-for-tat allegations of smuggling and border control abuses, the European Commission said Tuesday.

The team, which begins work on Wednesday, will attempt to soothe the row dividing London and Madrid over the British Mediterranean outcrop.

The number of people who have tried to illegally cross the border that separates the Spanish territory of Melilla from Morocco has nearly doubled this year but most fail to make it over, the interior ministry said Monday.

About 3,000 migrants tried to scale the border fence that surrounds Melilla, an autonomous Spanish city that borders northern Morocco, between January 1 and September 17, compared to 1,610 during the same period last year, the ministry said in a statement.

Spain's ailing 75-year-old King Juan Carlos is to undergo a second operation on his left hip on Tuesday, the royal palace said.

The head of the royal household, Rafael Spottorno, had announced Friday that surgeons would replace the king's artificial hip because an infection had developed in the area, less than a year after it was implanted to ease his arthritis.

Spain's 75-year-old King Juan Carlos has "at no time" considered abdicating despite needing surgery to replace a prosthetic hip, his eighth operation in just over three years, the royal palace said Friday.

It is the latest in a string of blows for the king, who walks with a crutch and has appeared frail in recent months, while weathering corruption scandals that have damaged his popularity.

A suburban train bumped into the back of another at Barcelona's main rail station, lightly injuring 22 people on Friday, officials said.

One train entering Sants de Barcelona station collided with the other, which was stationary, at 10:05 am (0805 GMT), said a spokeswoman for ADIF, Spain's rail infrastructure operator.