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.

Orbán, the friend of Trump and Putin, a figurehead of the European far-right, a Trojan horse in the European Union, has fallen resoundingly at the polls. Let his continental imitators and those who whitewash them and aspire to deal with him take note. Here the imitators are called Orriols and Abascal. Perhaps people are starting to be fed up with discourses of hate, division, and confrontation. With hopeless, enraged, and fatalistic shouting. With "everything is shit." With those who, instead of proposing viable solutions to very serious structural problems, look for enemies under every stone every day, magnify them, feed them. With those who fuel chaos, like Trump does.

¿Is there any medicinal herb that can cure us of forgetting? "We can all find our flower, we don't have it that far away, we surely have it very deep inside, hidden," says Eloi Aymerich, director and producer of the short fiction film Flor del cel, filmed in the lost valley of Vansa (Alt Urgell), on the southern slope of the Cadí. Since "Solitud" was filmed in 1991 on the northern slope of this mountain range –by Romà Guardiet, based on the novel by Víctor Català–, no other professional filming had been done. Rural depopulated Catalonia lives abandoned and quiet, both things. A delicate coexistence.

About to turn 92 – he would have turned 92 on May 1st –, the historian of philosophy Pere Lluís Font, a benchmark for a couple of generations of Catalan thinkers, passed away this Thursday. Honorary Prize for Catalan Literature in 2025, throughout his prolific career he carried out an immense academic and cultural work, always with wise and erudite discretion, and only achieved a certain popular and media recognition upon reaching ninety. Despite the ailments of age, he was able to enjoy the tributes and awards of this final stage of his life peacefully, accompanied by an enviable agility and intellectual vitality.

I start a bit far away, but it's about Trump... Manuel Azaña was the most vilified and hated Spanish political figure by the right during the republican years. He symbolized progressive reforms and anti-clericalism. He was not, by any means, a radical, but they painted him as if he were. As head of government and president, he was the main target of conservative propaganda, which considered him ultimately responsible for the "destruction" of the traditional order, that is, for secular inequality in favor of a few. A few years ago, in a rewriting operation, some fascist ideologues and publicists wanted to appropriate the patriotic Azaña, sidelining the progressivism that his intellectual parents and grandparents had so much denounced. The aim was thus to discredit Zapatero and Sánchez, supposed anti-patriots who sought to resolve the perennial mismatch of Catalonia. Fortunately, the rewriting of history has its limits.

We often discover the garlic soup. Today, the topic is re-naturalizing the city as a new trend: green axes, superblocks, restoring porous pavements, creating vertical gardens, etc. Without a climate crisis, from an hygienic perspective, Ildefons Cerdà already wanted to "urbanize the countryside and ruralize the city" more than a century and a half ago. And a century ago, Nicolau Maria Rubió i Tudurí (1891-1981), the first landscape architect in Catalonia and Southern Europe, a disciple of the Frenchman Forestier, envisioned the great Barcelona with a green vision: Tibidabo, Vallvidrera and Montjuïc; Vallcarca, Park Güell and Guinardó Park; the Llobregat and Besòs rivers as large water parks; Pedralbes and Horta; and especially the beaches as an extensive linear urban park. We have taken too long, far too long, to pay attention to him.

Empordà has been mythologized. It has been pampered. The media often talks about Cadaqués, Dalí, Josep Pla. Many people from Barcelona spend their summers there. The tramuntana is a wind with pedigree. Greco-Roman civilization reached us through Empúries: Manuel Brunet turned that beginning into the fable The marvelous landing of the Greeks in Ampurias. It is "the smiling plain" that Joan Maragall sang about in Enric Morera's sardana or the one that Jacint Verdaguer looked at from Mare de Déu del Mont to write the epic poem Canigó about the origins of the Catalan nation. The windy and rugged landscape of Alt Empordà and the abrupt and undulating landscape of Baix, with their small rural settlements, are a common theme in Catalan sentimentality, and the same can be said of the coves and beaches of the coast, which are so crowded.

Dolors Lamarca, a key figure in the modernization of the Catalan library system with the advent of democracy, died this Wednesday in Barcelona at the age of 82 from pneumonia. Born in Granollers in 1943, she had lived in Castellterçol in recent years. Widowed for decades after the death of Antoni Comas (1931-1981), who in the late post-war period was the first professor of Catalan language and literature at the University of Barcelona, ​​they had three daughters: Eulàlia, Núria, and Mercè. In fact, Comas's premature death at the age of 50 came when Lamarca had assumed the directorship of the new Library Service (1980-1983) within the Department of Culture of the Generalitat of Catalonia under the first Pujol government, with Max Cahner as minister, where she laid the foundations for the current library system (1981). However, she did not achieve the integration of the Barcelona Provincial Council's network into a global Catalan network.