A bag of salad, some cookies, cat food, or the plastic label from a water bottle. It's hard to find a supermarket without some kind of flexible packaging. They are present, on average, in half of the products, even up to 80%. But behind these wrappers lies an industry practically invisible to the consumer, yet essential for products to be promoted on shelves. From Riudellots de la Selva, in the urban area of Girona, Comexi has been developing the technology for over seventy years that allows for the printing and transformation of this type of packaging, a global market where it competes with some of the world's leading manufacturers.

Between Banyuls and Portvendres, in the Roussillon, there is a coast that has lived for more than a century with its back to tourism. The Costa Vermella, the continuation of the Costa Brava towards Northern Catalonia, displays one of its most well-preserved landscapes. There are no second homes, nor sports ports. But rather a protected area on the seafront and vineyards that merge with the water. It is the bay of Paulilles, a collection of beaches saved from the tourist massification of the 60s and 70s thanks to dynamite.

Ten months before the next municipal elections, the pro-independence tripartite that governed Girona since 2023 has come to an end. After a harsh article published on Sunday, in which the deputy mayor and candidate for re-election for Junts, Gemma Geis, had already anticipated that her "patience" had run out, the party of Carles Puigdemont has made the decision to leave the executive and move to the opposition. Geis announced this Tuesday morning at a press conference, accompanied by the party's six councilors. "Our degree of demand is very high and Girona deserves more," she stated.

Julia Aceituno first set foot in Girona in 1990. She had grown up in Talanga, a small town of 40,000 inhabitants an hour from the capital of Honduras, Tegucigalpa, and at the time she was 36 years old and had three children. "I came for a holiday during the time of Felipe González," she recalls. At that time in Girona there were only nine of her compatriots: "We all knew each other!". Thirty-six years later, in the urban area of Girona alone, it is estimated that there are about 20,000 people of Honduran origin, and in the entire province, 40,000.

The Ter river, before carving its path towards the Empordà plain, flows through a final narrow passage. It is the Congost, straddling Girona and Celrà, a bottleneck through which passes the road connecting to La Bisbal and Palamós (C-66), the train heading to Figueres and Portbou (R11), and also a little-known and large underground channel that supplies water to what is known as the Empordà of Gironès: the Vinyals irrigation ditch. The Congost becomes a mandatory compression point for all infrastructure. But despite the lack of space, ingenuity has made it possible that on Sunday a new path will be inaugurated, allowing pedestrians and bicycles to cross the Congost safely, separated from the intense and dangerous traffic of the C-66

Amidst the tourist monoculture of Cadaqués, Teresa Madrid and Pau López row against the current, with their sights set on the resilience of the ancestors who inhabited Cap de Creus. Almost a decade ago, they began managing different olive groves to make oil and to manage a flock of guirra sheep, from the area, to preserve soil fertility and clear the dry stone walls that they work manually. From Mas de la Senyora, they reclaim two of the fundamental pillars of Cadaqués' historical identity: agriculture and livestock farming. But also understood as a way of caring for the soil, building landscape, and creating community and culture beyond tourism and environmental protection.

The largest energy cooperative in Europe is based in Girona. What began in 2010 as a project linked to the UdG seeking to break the oligopoly of the big electricity companies has managed to become a recognized player in the Catalan energy landscape and also in the State as a whole, with 87,000 members.

New construction single-family homes, renovations and refurbishments in small towns in Empordà, near the Costa Brava. Mostly second homes for families from Barcelona. In keeping with the surroundings and made with local materials. This would be the most representative example of the award-winning architecture currently being produced in the Girona region. This is determined by the projects selected in the latest editions of the Girona Region Architecture Awards, organized by the Girona delegation of the Architects' Association of Catalonia (COAC).

When Noemí Selfín felt strong enough to return to the labor market after 16 years away from work, she knew she had to reinvent herself. At 52, with a disability resulting from an aggressive cancer and a career interrupted for over a decade by treatment, she sensed her resume would hardly compete on equal terms. “So many years out of the labor market made my profile unattractive. I needed to retrain,” she explains. During the pandemic, she began to orient herself towards tech profiles and enrolled in one of the tech bootcamps – intensive training courses – driven by Eurofirms Foundation.

With the news of an agreement in extremis between workers and the garbage collection company to call off the strike that threatened to adorn the city with filth, Girona is finalizing preparations for the event that attracts more people to the city each year: Temps de Flors. A show born in the fifties and consolidated from 1979 onwards, which reaches a record number of visitors each edition. In 2025, it reached 400,000 in just nine days, in a city of just over 100,000 inhabitants.

Joint front of entities, unions and parties in Girona against the manager of the Instagram account Girona Perduda, which with more than 30,000 followers has become since the start of the school year a channel for citizen discontent, on aspects such as cleanliness and safety in the streets, linking immigration and crime with a mixture of photos, videos and true data, others exaggerated, disinformation and fake news. Another example of allegedly non-partisan accounts that serve the far-right to polarize public opinion, according to the assessment of experts consulted by ARA, which in December uncovered the links between the administrator of Girona Perduda and Vox.

How many lives can a book have? In Celrà, straddling Girona and Empordà, for 16 years a recycled reading project has been beating, giving a new life to more than 300,000 books. It shares space with the town library in the old Pagans Factory, a gem of Catalan industrial modernism converted into a municipal space, where the Town Hall coexists with the municipal swimming pools, the library, the music school, art school, and a civic center with a bar and restaurant, and a free indoor play area for children and babies.

A hidden door behind one of the benches in the chapel of the baptistery of Girona Cathedral leads to a dimension suspended in time. It is the entrance to the bell tower of the largest medieval nave in the world. On the Gothic walls, the names of the bells can still be read, and the ropes hang from the ceiling to ring them. Climbing a beautiful and humble spiral staircase leads to one of the rooms that the Girona writer Prudenci Bertrana surely trod in the early 20th century. It is where the bell ringer lived until before the Civil War. Behind a large window overlooking the Plaça dels Apòstols hides a two-story dwelling with three cells, as if it were a stage. The same one where we can imagine the protagonist of Josafat living, the hunched bell ringer, with a pointed skull, eagle's nose and rough hair, who lives isolated, constrained between lust and the weight of sin to fall into the seduction of a prostitute.

Salt is known today for being the municipality with the lowest per capita income in Catalonia. Also one of the towns with the highest concentration of migrant population: nearly 40% of its residents are of foreign nationality. But what headlines have overlooked in recent years is that almost half of this town's surface area is still orchards and pastures. The Monar canal, parallel to the Ter river, marks the border between built-up Salt and the agricultural zone. Few facilities surpass it, except for a large high school built on fertile land. Located on the border with Girona, surrounded by greenery and with magnificent views of the Mare de Déu del Mont, lies Vallvera. A secondary and vocational training center with over 1,200 students inaugurated in 2008, it contrasts with its surroundings as a large gray sheet metal building with a concrete-filled courtyard. "In winter it's a refrigerator and in summer an oven, there's no middle ground!" laments the director, Ferran Maimir, who started this course with a direction very focused on working towards the renaturalization of the courtyard, but with a different method: having the students themselves build the shade with their hands.

When George Orwell (1903-1950) decides to travel to Catalonia in 1936 to fight as a militiaman in the Civil War and "kill fascists", he does not go alone. He had only been married for a few months to Eileen O'Shaughnessy, a brilliant 30-year-old woman who surpassed him in many educational aspects. While Eric Blair, the real name of the young English writer, had no more than secondary education at Eton, she had accumulated the background of having studied literature at Oxford and a postgraduate degree in psychology in London. They will have an unusual "honeymoon": while Orwell is on the Aragon front, Eileen will work in Barcelona receiving British militiamen and will be the first to realize the seriousness of the internal conflict that will lead to the May Events.

Nestled between the AP-7 motorway, the N-II national highway, and the railway line connecting Barcelona and Girona, in a village in the Selva region with fewer than 7,000 inhabitants, lies one of the ten fastest-growing European companies of the last decade: Kave Home. Its formula is quite unique, brimming with differentiating factors. It has become a "growth champion" by being headquartered outside a major city, operating as a 100% family-owned company, and reinventing one of the least modernized economic sectors: furniture. For the past three years, its CEO has been Francesc Julià Ametller (Girona, 1992), son of the founder of Julià Grup. What began with a small warehouse selling mattresses to hotels in Lloret de Mar is now a giant with over a thousand employees, most of them at its headquarters in Sils, having established a mid-range furniture model distinct from Ikea. "Making original, quality design affordable," in Julià's words. The former warehouse has been transformed into a cutting-edge company with hints of start-up More than selling furniture, it sells a concept of "how to live in your home."

Nassima arrives at the Girona Municipal School Enrollment Office (OME) completely exhausted. She had an appointment at ten in the morning, and it's now past ten-fifteen. "I went to work this morning, convinced the appointment was for tomorrow... I'm so stressed out with all this pre-registration stuff," she exclaims. A single mother with three children, her middle son is autistic, she had a premonition of this situation three years ago. That's when she fought hard with the Education Department to prevent her eldest, now 14, from starting secondary school at the Opus Dei-run school for boys in Girona, Bell-lloc College. "I wanted him to go to a public school," she exclaims, "but they didn't give me any alternatives then, and now I'd better figure it out. I can see my eldest will have to go study on the other side of the city because there are no other options or places available."

Older people know it because it was a Marist Brothers seminary. Those born in the 80s and 90s know it because they went there for their first summer camps, sharpening tools and building huts like prehistoric people. And for the Catalan cultural scene, it has become, in the last eight years, an interdisciplinary meeting point. An intimate space where you can enjoy everything from performances by emerging groups, companies, and artists to shows by renowned musicians like Sílvia Pérez Cruz, Adrià Puntí, and the Vallès Symphony Orchestra.

After years of back-and-forth negotiations and a host of uncertainties, the first images of what is to be the future Girona Health Campus were unveiled this Monday. This hospital complex will replace the current Josep Trueta Hospital and, according to institutional forecasts, should have its foundation stone laid by the end of 2028 and be completed by the end of 2031. The winning consortium in the design competition organized by Infraestructures.cat is the same one behind the Quironsalud Barcelona Hospital, the Doctor Moisès Hospital, and the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park, among other projects. This consortium, Pinearq, SLP & Brullet de Luna y Asociados and SLP & PEGI Engineering, SL., has designed a large hospital complex surrounded by trees, with green terraces and a large, car-free interior promenade. Named Devesa de Salut 21, it has received the highest score for the creation of a large amenity area with landscaped plazas connecting it to the city, and a commitment to renewable energy and bioclimatic architecture.

This novel was born during a conversation among friends after a meal, inspired by the testimony of one of their mothers. It's an unknown, harsh, and anonymous story that portrays the inner workings of families who "lived well" under the Franco regime in Girona. It also marks the debut in the genre of lawyer Benet Salellas, former CUP deputy and currently leading the defense of Santos Cerdánand a finalist for the 45th Justo M. Casero Short Novel Prize. "I think we all tend to write what we like to read," he explains about the project's genesis. "I love fiction; I studied Greek philology before studying law. I've always had a bit of a cultured side, and I was challenged to try to write a novel. I wanted it to be anonymous, so if it's validated, I'll feel more empowered in some way."