In the summer of 1980, the Spanish people watched with perplexity the outbreak of what would become one of the most remembered cases of the peninsula's true crime history. We are talking about the murder of the Marquis and Marchioness of Urquijo, an aristocratic couple who were victims of shots from a mysterious figure while they slept in their mansion in Somosaguas (Madrid). We label the killer as mysterious because, although the justice system handed down a sentence and convicted the couple's former son-in-law, the speculations about the participants in the crime have never stopped over the last forty-six years. In fact, the court itself opened the door to various hypotheses when it stated in the sentence that the person who fired was undoubtedly Rafael Escobedo Alday, "alone or in the company of others". This addendum seemed to point to a large number of individuals, all of them members of a grotesque bunch of characters who for years were protagonists in the media: the children of the Marquis and Marchioness, the irascible estate administrator, the effeminate butler, Dick the American (the daughter's second husband), the Marquis of Torrehermosa, or Javier Anastasio de Espona, who is the one we are really interested in.

During the Spanish Civil War, a food product began to gain popularity that helped solve the food shortages of households at that time. It was a cube that concentrated meat and vegetable extracts, and it served to make broth with a certain dignity. The manufacturer was called Gallina Blanca (initially, Gallina de Oro) and behind it was the entrepreneur Lluís Carulla Canals, originally from the Conca de Barberà. That was the first success of a great empire that still has gigantic dimensions today, such as Agrolimen (now The GB Foods). But contrary to what many people think, Carulla was not the pioneer of broth cubes, because long before the war, in Catalonia, those manufactured by the Franco-Swiss multinational Maggi could already be purchased normally.

There is an urban legend that says the spy novelist Ian Fleming publicly acknowledged that to create his character, James Bond, he based it on the life of the Canadian William Stephenson, spy, businessman, soldier, and inventor. The fact is that, if we pull the thread to verify this claim, we inevitably arrive at the prologue of the book Room 3606, written by Fleming himself. A good part of the sources that claim the writer stated unequivocally that Bond is Stephenson are based on altered versions of the actual text. It is true that Fleming was a friend of the Canadian and that he held him up as an example of a great spy, just as it is also true that he claimed his character is a blend of many people, among whom Stephenson was surely included.

On the eve of La Mercè in 1967, a light aircraft flying from Frankfurt to Nice crashed in the Italian Alps and its six occupants died. One was Harald Quandt, one of the richest men in Germany, who, curiously, had survived another plane crash only a couple of years earlier. In that first disaster, his light aircraft overturned the moment it was trying to take off from the Zurich airfield, in Switzerland, resulting in one death.

In the spring of 2011, the painter Huguette Clark died in New York City, just a couple of weeks shy of turning 105. Her death and her life had been full of mystery. Upon dying, she left a legacy of 500 million euros, but no descendants. The reason for the fortune she possessed is found in the figure of her father, a great copper magnate who conceived his daughter at an age when most mortals retire.

On June 6, 1981, a voracious fire engulfed a historic building in the city of Barcelona, which was located at the confluence of Pelai Street and Ronda Universitat. It was not just another building, because years earlier it had been the headquarters of the El Águila department stores, one of the most important in the Catalan capital for decades. The emblematic image that the press reflected the next day was that of the figure of the eagle that presided over the building completely surrounded by smoke. It fell a few minutes later and put an end to a long history.

We are in southern Colorado, in the United States, in a desert valley at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. It is one of those places that truly seems like the end of the world. But unexpectedly, at the gigantic Baca Grande ranch, in the town of Crestone, we find a whole series of religious centers that seem absolutely out of context: Zen Buddhists, Tibetan Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, and, even, a space for followers of the New Age, that spiritual movement that was so successful decades ago. What is the point of it all? The story begins in 1979, when the Canadian millionaire Maurice Strong and his wife, the Dane Hanne Marstrand, decided that on those lands they would organize the epicenter of the planet's new spirituality.

Until the forties, the Hungarian football league had been a matter of three: the vast majority of titles had been shared between Ferencváros, MTK, and Újpest Dózsa, the three great clubs of Budapest. But coinciding with the Second World War, a modest team from Csepel Island emerged, which was precisely called Csepel SC. It broke the prevailing hegemony thanks to its victories in 1942, 1943, and 1948. By the way, four years after the last title, during the 1951/52 season, Csepel SC had a young forward in its ranks destined to make history: his name was Zoltán Czibor, and some time later he would tread the Camp Nou to triumph dressed in blaugrana.

Night of January 20, 1985. Location of Zuoz, in the Swiss canton of Grisons. Two masked men move silently through one of the rooms of the Lyceum Alpinum boarding school, where the children of Central Europe's great fortunes study. They wake a 19-year-old young man who was sleeping peacefully and convince him to accompany them when they show him a pistol. After hours of travel in a car confined to the trunk, they lock him in a room and force him to record a message for his family in which he asks for a ransom of 15 million German marks, quite a fortune (about 825 million pesetas at that time, or almost 5 million euros).

If we speak of Israel Beer Josaphat, it is likely that this name will not mean anything to us, but if we refer to Paul Julius Reuter – his other identity – the surname will resonate with us. Indeed, the German Jew Reuter was the founder of the news agency that bears his name and which today is one of the most important in the world. The son of a local rabbi from Kassel, before he was thirty he converted to Christianity and married the daughter of a Berlin banker. Prior to all this, he had already had his first banking experience when the family sent him to Göttingen to work in a financial institution owned by his uncle. The bank job did not satisfy him much, but, at least, his presence in Lower Saxony would serve him to meet a fascinating character like Carl Friedrich Gauss, known as the Prince of Mathematics, but also a physicist and experimenter in the transmission of electrical impulses. For the moment, this last field was only a curiosity, but the seed had been sown.

The spring of 1994 saw the film Pulp fiction arrive at the Cannes Film Festival, which months later would be the first major success of a director from Tennessee named Quentin Tarantino. If a couple of years earlier he had already attracted attention with Reservoir dogs, with this second film he would achieve total consecration and transform into a money-making machine (the box office for this production exceeded 200 million dollars). More or less everyone has seen or, at least, has heard of Pulp Fiction, but not everyone knows what concept such a singular title refers to.

In the summer of 2005, the biggest corporate operation in Colombia's history took place, when the country's main brewery was sold to the South African company SABMiller for 7.8 billion dollars. Behind this transaction was Julio Mario Santo Domingo, the most important magnate in that Latin American country. His family had been the main shareholder of the brewery company since the sixties, with a tradition in the sector even further back in time, when in 1933 his father acquired Cervecería Barranquilla y Bolívar.

In the summer of 1588, during the Battle of Gravelines, the famous Spanish Invincible Armada was shattered by the push of the English fleet led by Francis Drake. The historical event, which led to a phrase as well-known as it is apocryphal, attributed to the King of Spain Philip II, was that a storm, during the retreat towards the Peninsula, finished off the Spanish ships: "I sent my ships to fight against men, not against the elements." Sir Horatio Palavicino, Italian by birth, but already a banker to the Queen of England, was contemplating the Spanish defeat from a distance, rubbing his hands with glee (it has often been said that he himself captained a ship of the English fleet, but it has never been officially confirmed that this is true).

On Saint John's Day in 1826, a historic event occurred in the center of Barcelona which, despite its great significance, is not entirely known. Generally, the beginning of public street lighting is remembered as the moment in 1843 when the Societat Catalana per a l'Enllumenat per Gas, founded by Pere Gil Babot and Charles Lebon, began to operate. But the reality is that a few years earlier, a solitary entrepreneur named Josep Roura Estrada illuminated a building in Barcelona for the first time using gas. The Saint John's Day we mentioned a few lines back was the date chosen by Roura to install a lighting system in the Llotja building, which was the seat of the Junta de Comerç school.

In January 2024, we explained the life and miracles of Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate who built a great fortune when he integrated his company, Carnegie Steel Company, into a large consortium devised by John Pierpont Morgan called US Steel. Behind the formation of this great company, in 1901, was the Connecticut banker, but also a less known financial artist than Morgan named William Henry Moore.

In any list of well-known whisky brands, you're very likely to find Jameson, an Irish brand that originated in the late 18th century when John Jameson left his native Scotland and moved to Dublin, where he dedicated himself to distilling this spirit. His descendants continued the work with great success, to the point that the family business has survived to this day, although now under the control of the French multinational Pernod Ricard. In 1966, Jameson joined forces with other distillers in the country to form the Irish Distillers brand, and twenty-two years later, this company passed into French hands.

Four and a half years ago, in December 2021, we talked about Gaspar Remisa, from Osona but based in Madrid, who pulled the strings of state finances during the first half of the 19th century. One of the figures he was often associated with was a French investor named José Buschental, who would also be a key figure in the Spanish Treasury of those times.

On December 16, 1877, an exceptional event occurred that placed Catalonia at the forefront of global technology. On that day, at the School of Industrial Engineers of Barcelona, the first telephony tests in the entire country and some of the first in the world were conducted.

In the spring of 2022, we told the life and miracles of the banker Alfred Loewenstein in a story that began, precisely, with his death in strange circumstances. On July 4, 1928, as his Fokker Trimotor was crossing the English Channel, the magnate opened the door that led to the outside of the cabin and plunged to his death. As the causes of the accident were never clarified, the shadow of suspicion loomed over all the characters who surrounded him. Inevitably, when looking for beneficiaries of a possible murder, the eyes turned to two men, Albert Samuel Pam and Frederick Szarvasy, both partners of Loewenstein.

Even though we may not be paying attention, oil always flows through the subsoil of our lives, as a fundamental element of most activities we carry out. But from time to time, it abandons its discretion and becomes part of the news headlines, never for a good cause. Today we are once again living through one of those periods when information about the price of crude oil torments us and threatens our way of life. Black gold has been the great fuel of capitalist society since the second half of the 19th century, but while today the big players are faceless multinationals, for many decades those who made and unmade things in this sector were well-known figures, such as Jean Baptiste August Kessler.