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.

Roger Bastida, with that nineteenth-century mustache he sports He himself has an air of another era, with the novel Passeig de Gràcia (Comanegra and Àfora Focus), winner of the 2026 Santa Eulàlia Prize, transports us to the most brilliant and turbulent period of contemporary Catalonia, the turn of the 20th century. While the book begins much earlier and ends with the mediocrity of the Franco regime, its depth and focus lie in the splendor of Modernism during the Noucentisme period, with the upper bourgeoisie, enriched in the Americas—yes, through slavery—as the protagonists of the industrial leap. The explosion of workers' demands and the rise of Catalan nationalism serve as a backdrop. The dominant perspective is that of those in power, and those who served them.

What should we do about death? We experience it intensely. It's a constant presence in the news. Ukraine, Gaza... and closer to home. It has a tragic face—wars and climate disasters—and an everyday face—old age, illness. It will come to us all. It's something natural, intertwined with the mystery of life. I ponder this as, having moved past the noise of the millennium celebrations, I climb Montserrat, where this three-way connection—nature, life, and death—becomes even more apparent. A thousand years of history, of intertwined human stories, as if we were passing the torch, with the whimsical and imposing rock formations as witnesses.

The accident in which Antoni Gaudí was struck by a tram on June 7, 1926, at the intersection of Bailèn and Gran Via streets, is well-known and forms part of the popular myth surrounding the brilliant architect, as does the fact that those who initially came to his aid thought he was a beggar. His simplicity and austerity were thus reinforced. Three days later, Gaudí died at the Hospital de la Santa Creu, the hospital for the poor, where he had been taken because of his appearance and where he chose to remain. So far, so well known.

When he was five years old, little Gerardo saw hooded men enter his room and take his father away in his underwear and without his glasses. It was the last time he saw him. His mother told him he had died of a heart attack. He believed her. A compelling self-deception. Until, at 23, he found the document certifying that he had suffered "various traumas." That lawyer and politician had been tortured and murdered by the Argentine dictatorship. This happened in San Miguel de Tucumán on June 24, 1976, one day after another grandchild was born to that father-grandfather. Skinny Pisarello had dared to defend political prisoners after General Videla's coup d'état three months earlier, on March 24th of that year. Now, half a century has passed since that infamy.

Just as for centuries, if not millennia, humans have carried the burden of myths about honor and war, in contemporary times (19th and 20th centuries) this began to change. The greater our destructive capacity, the more alarms were raised. The Kantian philosophical-political idea of Perpetual peace (1795) has been slowly making its way into our minds and hearts. A winding road, with dead ends, whose end we will still have to wait to see, if there is an end at all. It's so hard to believe in happy endings, isn't it? Today, almost no fiction has one. Neither happy nor unhappy. Everything is open, uncertain. Series don't really end... We are in a to be continued Infinite. War resists disappearing tooth and nail. It's ingrained in us.

We are in the Roman wall tower of the Palau Requesens, home to the Royal Academy of Belles Lettres. Eulàlia Duran, a sprightly 91 years old, feels almost like she's coming home. As a child, she lived in another Roman tower in Barcelona, ​​the one belonging to the Casa del Ardiaca. She is the daughter of Agustí Duran Sanpere (1887-1975), the man who reinvented the history of Barcelona and created both the city's archives and museum. Tonight—Thursday evening—he is being honored, somewhat belatedly, on the 50th anniversary of his death. In Barcelona, ​​Duran i Sanpere lends his name to a small passage in the Raval district, where the newspaper ARA is now located. A happy coincidence: with the establishment of the Ardiaca's newspaper archive, Duran i Sanpere did much to preserve the memory of the press. We newspapers have a duty to him. The city does too. Duran i Sanpere, who had preserved Catalan culture from the capital during Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, who had lived with enthusiasm and ambition during the Republican years at the helm of Barcelona's institutions, and who, stubbornly and skillfully, had maintained their continuity during the Franco regime, albeit for a few months. He did, however, witness with deep satisfaction the emergence of one of his daughters, young Eulalia, as a great historian, a true pioneer among women in times still dominated by patriarchal historiography. Eulalia Duran maintains an easy smile and enviable lucidity. Translator and intellectual protégée of Pierre Vilar, disciple of Jaume Vicens Vives—along with her friends Josep Fontana, Jordi Nadal, and Emili Giralt—compiler of Miquel Batllori's work, friend of Joan Fuster, professor to an entire generation of philologists and historians, her work is a history of the history of culture (16th-18th centuries).

Now that Vox has revived the Francoist spirit and made it blatant, it's worth explaining exactly what the dictatorship was. Let's be blunt: it was a savage act and a complete disaster. Mediocrity in power for forty years. Who better than an authoritative voice like that of the historian Josep Fontana (1931-2018) to provide a summary? His perspective is as informed as it is relentless. FrancoismJoaquim Albareda and Jaume Claret have compiled for the Eumo publishing house a devastating selection of Fontana's texts on the period. It was not his main subject of study, but it was an obsession, a self-imposed professional, historical, and civic-political duty.