Gin fumes in the hotel foyer. Shotguns of hair lacquer. Sideburns sharp enough to draw blood. On one side, tweed-and-testosterone conservatives sloshing G&Ts like it’s the Siege of Granada. On the other, flamenco devotees with ozone-destroying bouffants and eyes fixed on an imaginary stage. And wedged between them all: the exam candidates—browner, nervous, clutching documents…
My latest article—and my debut in the Spanish publication El Salto—has just gone live. 🎉 The piece focuses on Torrejón, a town whose healthcare “situation” is so dramatic it could be mistaken for satire… if it weren’t also happening across the entire Spanish public health system. But wait—before anyone abroad feels too smug—this isn’t just…
Why nostalgia for ’the good old days’ can be dangerous — and what’s really behind the revival circus Spain seems to be caught in a weird collective daydream lately — a growing number of young people claiming: “Under Franco, we lived better.” In my latest piece for the Camino de Ítaca column, I dig into…
Here’s the blink-and-you-miss-it summary: my latest Camino a Ítaca column dives into the Groucho-grade absurdity of political morality in Extremadura — a tale of ironclad vows that dissolved in record time, the machinery of hypocrisy grinding everything to paste, and the saints of this land who may be scarred but are no longer innocent. Read…
What if a dream of the sea could spark a rebellion? From the high Andes to the heart of Alberta’s oil country, The Great Landlocked Rebellion uncovers how nostalgia, geography, and fossil-fuel politics collide in a surreal story of imagined horizons and real-world resentment. Curious how a ghostly mariner becomes symbolic of modern political fever…
My travel-essay, “Everywhere and Nowhere: Following Ibn Battuta Across Marbella”, has been selected as a finalist by Intrepid Times in their “A Book Led Me There” competition. Intrepid Times In this piece I venture beyond Marbella’s glittering façade of sun-saturated luxury—Ferraris, gold chains, shopping sprees—and into the old town’s labyrinth of alleys where the echoes…
🎃 Trick, treat… and tradition with a twist 🎃 What if your Halloween bucket of candy held more than sweets—what if it carried a message about identity, culture, and the absurdity of purity? In my latest column for SUR in English (“The Purity Panic: Notes from the Museum of Imaginary Nations”), I peer into the…
(English below) Hay eventos que se venden como “fiestas de la cultura”, pero huelen más a cóctel de poder y subvención.En Cáceres montaron una bienal con 650.000 € de dinero público, pantallas gigantes, discursos sobre “la libertad” y, sí, Vargas Llosa elevado a santo laico del neoliberalismo. Lo que faltaba era público.Y verdad. Mi nuevo…
There are days and nights when the world feels like a badly written sketch — part tragedy, part meme, with the laugh track slightly out of sync. “Because when the world is this stupid, only something imaginary stands a chance.“ And then, out of nowhere, a unicorn shows up. Not the corporate one from Silicon…
Banksy, Justice, and the Violence of Silence The piece begins with a striking image: a Banksy mural that appeared overnight on London’s High Court — a furious depiction of justice turned executioner, of law reduced to raw violence. Within hours, authorities erased it. But their attempt at “cleaning” only deepened the message. The ghost image…