This week’s Camino a Ítaca grew out of two events that, taken separately, might seem unconnected. The first was the debate in the European Parliament over proposals that would make it easier to deport asylum seekers to third countries with which they have no meaningful connection. The second was much closer to home: the decision…
A few weeks ago, I found myself following yet another local controversy in Cáceres, the small Spanish city where I live. At the centre of it was the Cruz de los Caídos (“Cross of the Fallen”), a Franco-era monument that has become the latest battleground in Spain’s never-ending wars over history, memory, religion, and identity.…
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…
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…
A new long-form essay published in El Salto Diario Extremadura traces an unlikely line from the Pentagon to a roundabout in Cáceres. Beginning with the spectacle of religion in contemporary American politics — where faith, media, and military power increasingly blur — the piece follows a broader transformation: Christianity repurposed as political identity, its symbols…
There’s a particular kind of pride that comes from arriving late to something and still acting as if you’ve nailed the timing. You missed the drinks, the good conversation, and whatever fleeting moment of relevance the whole thing once had—but at least you showed up with confidence. And really, isn’t that what matters? Extremadura, in…
There’s a certain kind of art that appears whenever politics gets too involved in culture. It’s grand, symbolic, completely certain of itself — and often, unintentionally, a bit absurd. You see it in Stalinist skylines, Soviet statues, gold-plated presidential monuments. Different countries, same instinct: culture not as something messy and alive, but something to simplify,…