"I spent many years without returning to the beach"

Barcelona"Ball, beach and tatano". The former head of infectious diseases at Taulí Park, Manel Cervantes, who helped us understand the pandemic through television talk shows and also in the pages of ARA, lists the summer games of his childhood in the 1950s. The eldest brother of a more than large family, La Sagrera or Virrei Amat, both presided over by a huge radio.

Passionate about football, the street was his playground, and when he couldn't go outside, as he'd been forbidden to kick the ball inside the house, he developed a technique for throwing it and catching it with his hands and body in the hallway of his grandparents' house, which was long enough to prevent him from dropping it. "That's where my vocation as a goalkeeper was born," says the doctor, who explains that he last played on a large grass field at the age of sixty, in a veterans' match with the Galens medical team.

All his summer memories are positive except for a couple: when he was about five years old, one afternoon while playing ball alone near the neighborhood church, a municipal police officer took him away, brought his grandmother down, and fined him three pesetas in exchange for returning the ball. The reason? "The boy is playing in the street on Holy Thursday afternoon when it's prohibited until Easter Monday." "I don't remember if he paid the fine, but I doubt it, just like my grandmother used to," Cervantes adds. What he remembers perfectly is that he returned home with the ball and with a clear idea: "The further away from the church and the police, the better."

But the clashes with the security forces didn't end there. One Sunday, when he went to the beach with his grandfather, like most Sundays because "it was a sacred custom," a police officer called them out as they were leaving the station in Sitges, his grandfather's favorite beach after Benidorm.Where do they go without clothes on the street? The doctor called the police to Manel, a child, fully clothed, and his grandfather, who was wearing a swimsuit that reached his knees but had his shirt hanging off his shoulders. Between this and the fact that the sand was bothering him and the sun was burning, the doctor began to reject his Sunday plan: "Once I had to spend a couple of days in bed with my entire back covered in sunburn, probably because I didn't get the burn." "I didn't go back to the beach for many years," he says. Years later, he discovered the coarse sand and rocky beaches. Menorca is a paradise, and his children and grandchildren "have had a blast swimming in the sea or the pool." So he concludes: "Welcome summer every year, and may there be many more to come."