“It was essential to lie down on the sand and make a croquette when you knew they would call you for lunch.”

Barcelona"The sixties are the summers of my life," answers without hesitation Núria Sebastián, neuroscientist, professor of psychology at Pompeu Fabra University and National Research Award 2024. For her they were real holidays, when from the outskirts of San Juan until the beginning of October when they returned to school, coinciding with leader, settled with his mother, aunts, and cousins in his grandparents' house in Calafell, in the Espineta neighborhood. They were low houses right on the seafront, with no road in front of them, and where all the children spent the day playing.

She has tons of anecdotes about the days she spent soaking in the water, freezing cold and with wrinkled fingers, terrified of pricking herself with the spiderfish there, diving to catch and eat squid, marveling at the golden ladybugs she found, throwing them onto the sand and making a croquette when you sensed they were going to call you to eat. That way you could spend a little longer with your friends because later you had to sort things out."

The most special of all these memories is the day they were exceptionally let out to sleep late. "The rest of the nights there were arguments that ended quickly with a "go to sleep because I said so!" "I'd rather go to bed early than I could have," she explains. But that day, although they were even allowed to play on the beach at night, they had to stay awake because something momentous was about to happen. Núria's grandparents were among the few who had a television, and as you could see from the window overlooking the beach, there were quite a few adults watching from outside. She rushed out when Dad, who was the ultimate authority, told her to go: "He told me, 'This is a very important moment, we're there, on the moon.' And I thought it was impossible. I looked at the moon and couldn't see them."

Núria had a series of prohibitions, which she occasionally broke, such as riding her bike past the Barral house, where they had a lion cub; playing with the male children because they threw stones at each other, although she was in the front line to receive and throw stones, and when they put the irons on her, she was also strictly forbidden from riding any bike that wasn't hers to avoid any accidents, but "one day I crossed all the red lines riding Silvia's bike. I flew out and landed on the landing lines. I also did supposedly more feminine things like selling my grandmother wet or dry sand, and shells of all sizes, in exchange for pebbles.