A salt lake inside the crater of an extinct volcano is not where most people expect to find a lesson in history, identity, and cultural resilience. Yet on the island of Sal, Cabo Verde, floating in mineral-rich brine while voices echoed from the crater walls, it became impossible to ignore how landscapes absorb human stories…
Marx, Castro, Lenin and the Pope are at the racetrack. The communists are studying the odds; the Pope is down in the paddock asking after the horse that nobody wants. As the new Pope prepares for a visit to Spain, an odd political spectacle is taking shape. The same far-right forces that eagerly borrow from…
Spain is currently gripped by yet another political corruption scandal, and as always the debate has quickly moved beyond individual wrongdoing to broader claims about the moral bankruptcy of the left itself. That reaction prompted me to write Judas Lights. The piece argues that there is a crucial difference between a corrupt politician and a…
Northlands Park was never a glamorous place. It was cigarette smoke caught in prairie heat, dust ground into shoes, racing forms folded in tired hands, and generations of men trying to read meaning into odds, instinct, and luck. In many ways, it was less about horses than about belief itself, the deeply human desire to…
The thing outsiders (and some insiders) often misunderstand about Spain is that Francoism did not end the way Nazism ended. There was no Nuremberg. No national reckoning. No purge of institutions. Franco died peacefully in bed in 1975, and much of the state simply rolled forward carrying his fingerprints into democracy. Judges remained judges. Powerful…
Vultures circling above a dusty football pitch. A traditional wrestling festival in rural Gambia. A man who seemed to drift through the edges of the crowd unnoticed — until he stepped into the circle and became something else entirely. My latest travel feature, published in Spanish by Nueva Tribuna, explores transformation, belonging and the strange…
Cáceres undergoes a curious transformation every spring. For one weekend, the medieval city fills with African percussion, NGO stalls, craft beer, dreadlocks and the language of global citizenship as WOMAD, the travelling world music festival founded by Peter Gabriel, arrives in town. Officially, it is a celebration of multicultural openness and artistic exchange. In reality,…
There are few things stranger than watching former colonial powers attempt to market conquest as a feel-good cultural product in the twenty-first century. This month, a taxpayer-funded delegation led by Isabel Díaz Ayuso and accompanied by 80s pop-zero, Nacho Cano travelled to Mexico to stage an event titled Celebración por la Evangelización y el Mestizaje…
It began, quite simply, with reading Joseph Roth. But as I kept reading, and watching the news here in Spain fill with talk of “national priority,” something shifted. The distance between then and now began to feel thinner than it should. The phrase has been circulating in recent months, attached to new political agreements in…
At the beginning of my book Stories Left in Stone: Trails and Tales in Cáceres, Spain, my friend Carlos Blay takes me deep into the Cueva de Maltravieso. There, in the dark, is the oldest known expressions of art in Europe (it was in the world until a recent discovery in Asia): a handprint on…