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,…
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…
When people say Spain needs to “go back,” there’s an obvious question that rarely gets asked: back to where, exactly? Pick a year. Go back far enough and the nostalgia starts to look rather different. Married women needed their husbands’ permission to sign contracts, manage property or conduct business. Legal independence, privacy and freedoms we…
“I refer to the facts.” That was the response of Archbishop Luis Argüello, president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, when challenged about the Catholic Church’s handling of sexual abuse. It’s a powerful phrase—but it invites an obvious question: Which facts? That question is the starting point for my latest article, published in the Spanish newspaper…
I’ve spent much of the past few days watching the online reaction to Mariano Rajoy’s remarks about the French national football team. Most of the debate has centred on whether his comments were racist or if indeed racism is a problem in Spain. That seems to me to be only part of the story. What…
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 tiger, a pope, Bad Bunny, migration, hell, the Spanish left, and the curious tendency of otherwise intelligent people to mistake agreement on one issue for agreement on everything else. My latest essay, A Tiger in a White Cassock, was published yesterday in CounterPunch and has now also appeared in Spanish translation in Nueva Tribuna.…