RSS encoding and whitespace

Hello, trying to create an RSS feed for a blog, I'm using the default rss.php and rss_post.html. The only change I've made is pulling some block contents like this

<item>
    <title>
        <perch:blog id="postTitle" />
    </title>
    <link>
        <perch:blog id="domain" /><perch:blog id="postURL" />
    </link>
    <guid>
        <perch:blog id="domain" /><perch:blog id="postURL" />
    </guid>
    <description><perch:if exists="postDescHTML"><![CDATA[<perch:blog id="postDescHTML" encode="false" />]]><perch:else /><![CDATA[<perch:blocks><perch:block type="text" label="Texto"><div class="simpletext__base simpletext--editor">
    <perch:content id="simple-text" type="textarea" label="Texto Simple" html="false" escape="true" />
</div></perch:block><perch:block type="image" label="Imagen"><perch:template path="blog/body_image.html" /></perch:block><perch:block type="list" label="listado"><perch:template path="content/list.html" rescope="parent" /></perch:block></perch:blocks>]]></perch:if>
    </description>
    <pubDate>
        <perch:blog id="postDateTime" format="D, d M Y H:i:s O" />
    </pubDate>
</item>

The main problem is that special characters appear with wrong encoding. For example continuación and También instead of continuación and También. Adding encoding="utf-8" on the top of the feed makes no difference. I'm completely confused with Windows-1252, ISO 8859-1 and so on.

The second and minor issue is that there are some huge white spaces between html tags in the description output.

Could you please help?