Josep Maria Sans i Travé has died. The media have buried him with brief notes. Fame has long ceased to go hand in hand with erudition or a job well done. It follows other winding and unpredictable paths. Perhaps it has always been this way. A few months ago I received his last book, with a dedication included, "Dos bàndols, a novelized recreation of the post-war atmosphere in Solivella, the town in Conca de Barberà where the Xipella subdialect is spoken and where he was born in 1947. He soon left for Barcelona and beyond. But he returned often. He was a restless man all his life, an intellectual of action with a political soul. An "orden" Catalanist with a shrewd look, with a controlled impetuosity.

Does the genius loci exist, do places have a soul? Is Escaladei, the corner of Priorat where the Carthusian monks settled in the 12th century, a magical place? Without that monastic gesture, the region would not be a land of vineyards today. Why do we get emotional in certain environments? Is it because we are predisposed? Did the first people who set foot in the place and decided to stay feel something special, a spirit, a daimon? What were they looking for, what seduced them? Beyond the ideas and baggage we all carry, beyond our capacity for suggestion and imagination, beyond the language with which we describe it, nature is always an here and now. An autonomous reality. A powerful fact.

Rereading Oriol Bohigas, I found in his diaries a reference to his time at the mythical Institut-Escola. He recounts an anecdote illustrating the civic spirit of that exemplary institution, which was meant to be the vanguard of republican educational change. The dictatorship destroyed it all. Damned authoritarian intolerance, which is returning... Educational optimism, tinged with an essential veil of naivety, remained buried for decades. But we must also return to it. Urgently.

Nigel Barley, educated at Oxford, spent two years in Cameroon doing fieldwork. The experience resulted in a hilarious self-critical chronicle, The Innocent Anthropologist. The Dowayos took him for a ride. And he ended up playing along. The work has become a classic.

The joke goes that the PSC is now the Christian Social Party. Salvador Illa has been explicit since he became president in his ideological positioning, which he bases on Christian humanism. The same that Pope Prevost, Leo XIV, defends, as has been clear in his first encyclical. The social aspect of this pontiff is even more solid than that of his popular predecessor, the Argentine Bergoglio. Prevost has become a strong global voice in favor of welcoming immigrants, in favor of the most vulnerable, against the renewed warmongering of Trump, Netanyahu, and Putin, in favor of cultural dialogue and against platform capitalism that polarizes society, both ideologically and economically, with a purely pecuniary logic of use of algorithms and artificial intelligence.

We interview the delegate president of the Sagrada Família Construction Board Foundation, Esteve Camps, a few days before Pope Leo XIV visits the temple to mark the centenary of Antoni Gaudí's death.

The politician, writer, economist, and urban planning consultant Antoni Vives has lived for six and a half years in Saudi Arabia, at the service of Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), designing and promoting the construction of the linear city Neom, in the desert at the northern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, on the Red Sea coast; a unique commitment to sustainable modernity, conceived for architects and engineers as well as botanists. Civilization and nature: 170 km long, on paper it is designed to run on renewable energies and intended for 9 million inhabitants who will not need to use cars, with all personal and collective services within 5 minutes. It is the largest open-air construction project in the world. Will they succeed?

In history, underlying continuities tend to be stronger than explosive ruptures. Even if they are continuities blended by the mixer of geek nostalgia, behind which one doesn't have to stir much to find the defense of unspeakable interests and ultranationalism. Now Donald Trump wants to return to the 19th century: commercial protectionism (multi-purpose tariffs), superpower geopolitics (peace through the threat of war, not diplomatic multilateralism), and shredded democratic institutions (strong, personalistic, autocratic political leaderships). Does the 21st-century Catalan resemble the 19th century as well? Political scientist Jordi Muñoz argued a few days ago for the similarity between territories where Sílvia Orriols' xenophobic Alliance has more demographic traction and the regions where 19th-century Carlism received more electoral support towards the end of the 1800s.

Hanns-Erich Kaminski, author of the famous chronicleEls de Barcelona (on the beginnings of the Civil War in the Catalan capital, published in Paris in 1937 and now recovered by Adesiara with translation by Francesc Parcerisas and with a prologue by Aurora Madaula), was born in 1899 in Germany. He studied economics, philosophy, and literature at the universities of Königsberg, Freiburg, Berlin, and Frankfurt, until he enrolled in 1921 at Heidelberg and obtained his doctorate in 1922 with a thesis on dumping.

Metamorfosi, una revolució antropològicaMetamorfosi, una revolució antropològica (Arcàdia), the Catalan translation, by Cesca Castellví Llavina, of Yayo Herrero's latest essay (Madrid, 1965). We live trapped in a dystopian moment, of wars and pandemics. It seems like the Middle Ages. The author's response is a revolution. But not political, but anthropological.

The Archbishop of Tarragona, Joan Planellas, attends to ARA from the Archbishop's Palace, seven years after taking office. He is also president of the Tarraconense Episcopal Conference, which brings together Catalan bishops.

He has done it. He has pardoned himself "forever". In terms of taxes, he and his family will be able to do whatever they damn well please from now on. They will never be able to be investigated. The president of the USA has signed an out-of-court settlement with the tax agency that depends on his government, endorsed by the Department of Justice headed by one of his former lawyers. It's all in the family. In other words, Trump has agreed with himself to eternal tax absolution. The message is clear: I do whatever I want, got it? My power is absolute.

Trump will pass. Leo XIV will remain. The Church already has it, this: it has been lasting for 2,000 years. Its horizon is distant, infinitely more stable than the legislature of a stagnant liberal democracy. At the pace of eternity, Robert Francis Prevost is the 267th Pope. The Church is not democratic, of course. It is pyramidal. Now it wants to be synodal (from synod), that is, more participatory and plural: Pope Francis began to open doors in decision-making processes to laypeople and women, and to peripheral figures far from the walls of the Vatican. Leo XIV is following this path, that of a collegial and decentralized ecclesial government. When young Robert Francis once asked his mother, Mildred Martínez, if she wanted to be like men, she replied: "No, because we are already better!" A wise and brave woman behind the new American Pope. The one of a silent revolution?

The indignant Catalanism is the political virus that besieges us. The perception of the language's decline, that is to say, identity fear, is taking hold of the autochthonous population. Angry Catalan has returned. The independence defeat has made it more bitter because there is no horizon. The reality is harsh: housing crisis, educational crisis, strained healthcare, permanently failing rail transport... If we add to this the weakness in the social use of Catalan, which is perfectly real, we have the explosive cocktail. It is easy to excite the feeling of impotence. It costs little to launch apocalyptic messages with enemies who cannot defend themselves: immigration.

"I am a maniac for islands", confesses Enric Bou, a Venetian by adoption, to Venice. City of Losses (Editorial UB). The lagoon city is made up of one hundred and nineteen islands. The first inhabitants, emerging from the spoils of the Roman Empire, took refuge from the Hun and Germanic invaders in the lagoon, on islands such as Torcello, where the oldest church stands, and on Rialto (Rivoalto, high bank), where the famous bridge now stands (there are more than 500 bridges in the entire city).

20% of immigrants are highly qualified people. There are university graduates who arrive by raft. This was stated this Thursday at a breakfast of the Nueva Economía Fórum, at the Hotel Palace in Barcelona, by Josep Oriol Pujol Humet, who since 2002 has directed the Pere Tarrés Foundation, an entity that, like President Salvador Illa, has Christian humanism as its ideal. A good part of those who listened to Pujol Humet belong to the social third sector and, therefore, they resonate with his concern that 33% of the Catalan child population (under 16 years of age) lives at risk of poverty or social exclusion.

In 1936, 865 book titles in Catalan had been published in Catalonia, the highest number reached during the republican years. In 1976, with Franco already dead, 872 were published. Four decades had passed and Catalan was barely emerging from the depths. Currently, production is approaching 7,000 titles annually. The cultural battle for the language is also fought today in the audiovisual world. But written culture remains the foundation of everything. Where do we come from?

The brilliant figure of Ildefons Cerdà has often served as a scapegoat. The trend was initiated by a prominent figure of conservative Catalanism and modernist architecture, Josep Puig i Cadafalch. His obsession still lingers. The Barcelona City Council finally wants to dedicate a sculpture to Cerdà in Universitat square, one of the initial spaces where the Eixample began to be built. Surely someone will still pull from the drawer of bad ideological fixes the tired clichés about the engineer who shaped modern Barcelona: that he was a utopian socialist (false), that he was a unimaginative rationalist (false), that Madrid imposed his project on us (in this case, it was a stroke of luck). For too long, he has been absurdly and simplistically despised as a centralist stain.

Indeed, Saint George is like capitalism, which integrates everything. On Rambla de Catalunya, between stands of roses, NGOs, and political parties, I stumble upon one from the National Police, just below Mallorca street. I feel a chill and instinctively move away. I'd say there are no Mossos: for now, they've been given the mission of entering secondary schools undercover. On a day like today, Catalan police might have to recite poems that don't incite violence, without dragons or Saint Georges, much to Mendoza's delight. Meanwhile, the police of old are handing out leaflets to children on Rambla de Catalunya. Barcelona, indeed, continues to be a city of wonders.

In a country that is both Catholic and priest-eater like ours, the relationship between religion and politics has historically been sinuous and critical. Polarization became very extreme during the Civil War, the echo of which continues to resonate. Vox-PP remind us of it every day. At the same time, there are surprising phenomena: we have, for example, a socialist president, Salvador Illa, who does not hide his Christian humanism in the midst of a society that is going in another direction, increasingly secularized and orphaned of meaning. And at the same time, we have an independentist far-right that banally warns about the dangers facing Christian civilization, whose values it does not practice.