This is the last in my series of articles on Alberta’s great separatist adventure: an extraordinary waste of money, political oxygen and everyone’s time that ended with roughly three quarters of Albertans deciding that destroying Canada probably wasn’t such a good idea after all. Except I may have been watching the wrong story. While everyone—including…
A few days ago, Alberta, the Canadian province where I am from, voted on whether to begin the process that could eventually have led to a binding referendum on independence. It didn’t get very far: roughly 76% voted to remain Canadian. But the process itself struck me as interesting, particularly from where I now live,…
Today, back home in Alberta, people are voting in a referendum that isn’t quite a referendum, essentially a vote on whether there should eventually be a vote on leaving Canada. For readers in Spain, this requires a little explaining. Alberta separatism comes with oil, old grievances against Ottawa, memories of Quebec, a dash of Brexit…
Spain is heading into a snap election, and judging by the country’s right and far right, you might think the place was somewhere between economic ruin and civilizational collapse. There is one awkward problem: reality. Spain is currently the fastest-growing major advanced economy, while employment has been hitting record highs. That doesn’t mean there aren’t…
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…