There is a strange experience that comes with living abroad: occasionally the country you live in looks very different from the country being discussed elsewhere. That was the starting point for this piece. Over the past year, I’ve watched Spain’s Pedro Sánchez become something of a progressive pin-up internationally: articulate, pro-European, humane on immigration and,…
The vultures arrived before the wrestlers did. In Bwiam, a dusty town in southern Gambia that most travelers see only through a windshield, an annual wrestling festival slowly takes shape beneath the heat: women cooking under a shea tree, children and vendors gathering around a circle scratched into the sand, drums waiting to begin. And…
Cáceres is bidding to become European Capital of Culture in 2031 under the banner of Transcultura: cultures crossing borders, mixing and becoming something new. Which is an excellent idea. Although apparently nobody told the Blues. This summer in Korhogo, Côte d’Ivoire, music drifting through my hotel window led me across a dirt road and into…
Some symbols refuse to stay in the past. Fifty years after Franco’s death—and after a dictatorship that ended with political prisoners still being executed—Spain is once again arguing over monuments, memory and the meaning of symbols inherited from authoritarianism. But this is not only a Spanish story. From Europe to the United States and beyond,…
Not everyone who travels is a traveller. And perhaps it is becoming harder to be one. In the latest issue of the Ateneo de Cáceres magazine, I write about mass tourism and something much older: what it actually means to travel. From Marbella to Ibn Battuta, from Portugal to Mali, from consuming places to allowing…
On a rock face beneath the castle in Monfragüe National Park in Spain, thousands of years of human communication seem compressed into a few metres of quartzite: prehistoric figures painted in ochre, then symbols, then an Iron Age inscription meant to be read. It looks like a journey forward, from image to language, from memory…
Some places demand to be seen. Others persuade you to stop looking quite so hard. Sal, in Cabo Verde, was the latter: volcanic, salt-scoured and spare, an island of tradewinds, long horizons and enough light to make ambition seem faintly ridiculous. My short piece “No Stress” appears in the Autumn 2026 issue of Travel Africa,…
There are landscapes we carry inside us long after we leave them, places we assume will always be there waiting for us. The Okanagan Valley is one of those places for me. Last summer, I brought my daughters back there. Then the highway closed, the smoke descended, and a familiar landscape suddenly became something else.…
When people say Spain needs to “go back,” there’s an obvious question that rarely gets asked: back to where, exactly? Pick a year. Go back far enough and the nostalgia starts to look rather different. Married women needed their husbands’ permission to sign contracts, manage property or conduct business. Legal independence, privacy and freedoms we…
Before I properly met the river that gives The Gambia its name, I met a kola nut. It was bitter, faintly medicinal and almost comically unpleasant — but it also turned out to be a small doorway into the country itself. From the market stalls of Soma, the journey moved east: across a river strangely…