The dead, the disappeared, and the forgotten—these Iberian poems make clear—can never be safely put away.
Tag: Spain
Laboratory of Conversations: The 15M Movement
Ten years ago today, Spain’s “15M” movement burst on the scene. In short order, everything changed. Or has it?
Past Dictators Never Die
What happens when a regime founded upon exclusion, racism, nationalism, and an authoritarian leader ends? In Spain, such a regime never really ended.
B-Sides: Carmen Laforet’s “Nada”
When freedom will not arrive to us, can we get nearer to it?
Whose Spanish, Anyway?
Policing the borders of the Spanish language was a tool of religious and racial discrimination. Yet Spanish is not inherently imperial.
Casa de Pueblo: Recovering Spain’s Rural Past
I wish I had an answer, but the truth is, I don’t know what I’m going to do with this dilapidated, 17th-century historic estate that has been vacant since the 1960s ...
Four Days in Catalonia: The Referendum in Pictures
By 9:30 a.m. on October 1, voting had only just begun at the Sanllehy medical center in the La Salut neighborhood of Barcelona. A large crowd had gathered outside the polling station...
Catalonia Is Real. And Yet…
La gran ilusión is an original and penetrating take on the last decade of mounting tensions between Catalonia and Spain, tensions that have now culminated in Spain’s deepest political crisis since …
Spanish Civil Wars
“Is this Barcelona?” The question sets the tone for the final scenes of Sebastià Alzamora’s novel Blood Crime. It comes from the thoughts of a young religious man, a member of the Catholic group ...
The Basque Novel Comes of Age
Ramon Saizarbitoria’s Martutene, hailed as the best novel ever written in Basque and now available in English translation, is, among other things, a moving ...
Benidorm After Brexit and the “Burbuja”
In the early 1950s, Mayor Pedro Zaragoza left Benidorm, the sleepy coastal town he governed, to make the 300-mile trip to Madrid by Vespa. He had an audience with General Franco ...
Comics versus Franquismo
In the late 1960s, dictator Francisco Franco slowly opened Spain to tourism while continuing to obliterate public memory of the retributions meted out after the Civil War (1936–9). I spent those ...
Don Justo and the Never-Ending Cathedral: Mejorada del Campo, Spain
The 21st-century traveler is chronically late: the cathedrals are all built, or, if by some historical accident left unfinished, buried under ...
Monte Ulia, Euskadi
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. You may have visited San Sebastian, Spain—Donostia, as the locals began calling it again ...
Enrigue’s Backspin
Four-fifths of the way through Álvaro Enrigue’s Muerte súbita (Sudden Death), the narrator admits that he doesn’t know what the book is about. It’s not about the birth of tennis as a popular sport ...
Sketches of Spain 2: A Simple Life in Salamanca
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. “Go to Salamanca!” The open mic at El Rastrel—a vegetarian tapas bar in Salamanca ...
Sketches of Spain 1: A Vegan Bunny in Barcelona
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Via Laietana, one of the biggest streets in Barcelona, a city where making or ...