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.

On the Cap de Creus peninsula, within the municipality of Roses, lies Cala del Calis, also known as Cala del General, inside the bay of Montjoi. This is where the El Bulli restaurant once stood—now a kind of museum without food—and next to it, right above the small cove, stands Casa Camprubí, a former hermitage acquired in 1885, half a century after the Mendizábal confiscations, by Brigadier General Fèlix Camprubí Escudero, grandfather of Zenobia Camprubí Aymar Jiménez.

David Uclés is on his way to becoming the great champion of Rodoro's work. Elisenda Solsona is no slouch either. Within the framework of the CCCB exhibition on Mercè RodoredaHer talk this Monday before the more than four hundred people who filled the Hall, an enthusiastic audience, has become a festival of unrestrained praise. Rodoreda as a precursor of European magical realism (earlier and harsher than its Latin American counterpart), as an eternally innocent yet malevolent child, as an author of the everyday and terror, as a dreamlike and symbolic master. How could she be a not-so-good witch? It seems that in most of her texts, witches of all kinds and conditions appear...

In recent years, the issue of 19th-century Catalan slavery, which had remained hidden, has begun to be discussed openly. Catalan industrialization cannot be explained without the blood money that flowed in from Cuba. But slavery has a centuries-long history throughout the world, including in Catalonia. Ancient Rome is its paradigm. With the fall of the empire, this form of total submission, which was also an economic system, did not disappear. Between the 5th and 10th centuries, there was a long transition between slavery and the feudal system: the shift from slaves to serfs (from direct slave exploitation to indirect, feudal, or manorial exploitation). Pure slaves continued to exist, often captured in wars, and now more prevalent in the urban world. In fact, the use of the term slave It resurfaced strongly in the 13th century, at the height of the Middle Ages, with the trafficking of captured men and women, primarily from the Black Sea and southern Europe.

Charter schools are thriving, especially those that carry out social integration work, which, contrary to what some believe, is quite important. Elite private schools (without government funding) are often confused with charter schools, which encompass a wide variety: teachers' cooperatives, religious schools, etc. In Barcelona's Raval district, where ARA is based, there are several long-established charter schools that serve thousands of children from low-income families with diverse backgrounds. This does not mean that public education, across Catalonia, is responsible for the bulk of education. Including preschool, primary, secondary, and vocational training, the figures are as follows: 3,835 public schools (with over one million students, 65% of the total and 75% of all Catalan students with special educational needs) and 681 charter schools (350,000 students, 22%). There are 940 private, non-subsidized schools (more than 150,000 students, 11% of the total, and 2.7% of those with special needs).

Our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers had the subversive dignity to assert their personalities against all odds, to resist being conditioned by men (fathers, husbands, sons), family, social class, race, religion, or nation to the point of determining who they were, of overriding their essence. After Freedom, an essay turned into a surprising autobiography, Lea Ypi (Tirana, 1979), Albanian political scientist from the London School of Economics, now publishes Indignity (Ángulo Editorial and Anagrama), a painful quest into the life of her grandmother, Leman Ypi.

Nobody likes to speak ill of their country. Me neither. Self-criticism is tedious. It's easier to relativize, to look the other way, to see the speck in someone else's eye and not the log in your own. It's uncomfortable to put your finger on your own wounds. When the wound is open, it hurts. In this article, I do just that: apply a good splash of alcohol to see if our political, social, economic, and cultural body reacts. I confess I don't have much hope. The warning signs are clear.