It begins with a simple observation: across Spain—and much of Europe—the streets, plazas, and churches are named after immigrants, or at least migrant ideas, from the Middle East who arrived two thousand years ago and helped shape what is now called “Christian civilization.” Yet in today’s political climate, migrants from many of the same regions…
For fifteen minutes during the Super Bowl halftime show, Spanish took center stage in one of the biggest cultural spectacles on the planet. Across Spain, many viewers felt a surge of pride. But for parts of the nationalist and far-right political sphere, the moment also exposed an uncomfortable contradiction: celebrating the global success of the…
I just published two versions of the same essay: one in Spanish, from Europe, and one in English, for Canadian and anglophone readers. They’re siblings rather than twins—similar in structure, different in inflection, each shaped by its imagined audience. The piece reflects on Canada, on Mark Carney’s Davos speech, and on that peculiar comfort of…
Sometimes a city isn’t a skyline or a list of monuments. Sometimes it’s a story that refuses to stay still, slipping through tidy definitions and glossy brochures. I was recently invited—somehow, improbably—to write for the Ateneo de Cáceres, as part of their reflections on what culture means in the context of Cáceres’ bid for European…
I’ve just published a new opinion piece in El Cuaderno Digital titled “Elegir al verdugo: manual extremeño de autodestrucción electoral” (Choosing the Executioner: an Extremaduran Manual of Electoral Self-Destruction). The article is not about a single party or a single election. It’s about a recurring political gesture: the moment when frustration, abandonment, and long-term neglect…
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…
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…