Saray is alone. In the last row. At one end of the enormous hall where nearly 600 people gather. When the music plays, she sings emotionally, as if the notes were welling up from within. From the depths of her soul. Suddenly, she opens her palms and closes her eyes. Her expression changes; a couple of tears appear timidly. She doesn't hide it. She cries. She empties the accumulated pain. While Pastor Roberto Cano speaks, she checks her phone. A couple of scrolls on Instagram, some WhatsApp conversations, and most importantly, the time it will take her to catch the bus. A few minutes later, as the meeting with Hillsong's faithful continues, this 25-year-old Colombian leaves hastily. She has to go to Guissona to see her parents and is afraid of missing the bus. "I'm crying for a personal matter, not traumatic, but a deeply felt matter," she explains as the music starts playing loudly again on the stage of the venue that Hillsong has in Poblenou, Barcelona. She met this evangelical Church when she came to Barcelona to study, although she hadn't attended the meetings for months.

Nearly a thousand people climbed the world's highest mountain, Everest, last year. Humans know the limits and secrets of our environment, of what we see, very well, and even the most inaccessible point has become a tourist attraction. But on planet Earth there are still many things we don't see, practically unreachable places. Everest is two kilometers shorter than the deepest point in the oceans, the Challenger Deep, in the Pacific, an immense well that is almost 11,000 meters deep. There are still many secrets to discover.

The wind on your face. Dry skin. Salt on your lips. The furious water breaking at the bow. Playful dolphins surfing the waves. A large whale waving goodbye as the Sun hides beyond the horizon, where the water and the sky become indivisible. Moving forward at full speed in the middle of nowhere. The immense ocean. Seafarers always talk about the feeling of freedom that sailing entails. But ships are also a prison in motion. Working in the merchant navy is hard. Months away from home. The same faces day and night. Practically, without getting off the ship for a long time.Joel is a 40-year-old Filipino sailor. He has been working in the merchant navy for 19 years. He has learned to live with the solitude and absence of his daughter Casidy, who will soon turn 8. In January, he left home to embark on a new voyage aboard the Seadrive, a 130-meter-long merchant ship flying the Maltese flag with a crew of 24, all Filipino. He has not been able to see his daughter again until this August. Almost eight months apart. A few years ago, when his father died, he asked to return home to be with his family and share their grief. They did not let him. "It was not convenient for the company," he confesses with a serious face. He accepted it resignedly. "Filipinos have too good a character," summarizes Pep Costa, a merchant captain who now works at the Port of Barcelona and lives on a 15-meter-long boat in the port of Garraf. Francesc Lleal was also a merchant captain. He is now 80 years old and lives in a house in Badalona. From the terrace, he contemplates the timid waves that die gently on the beach, nothing like the violent storms he endured when he was at the helm. In his house, wherever you look, everything is a maritime reference. The dining room is presided over by a painting of the steamship Apolo, a ship that disappeared in the Atlantic returning from Cuba in 1885. Two of his great-grandfather's brothers drowned in the ocean. "I was destined for the sea, my father was a merchant marine captain. At 5 or 6 years old, at school, they called me the sailor," he explains. As a child, he and his six siblings went a year and a half without seeing their father, who was stationed in Equatorial Guinea. As an adult, he was the one who was absent. Eighteen months away, uninterrupted.Seamen

Lleal, Costa or Joel are some of the millions of men who live or have lived from the sea. Today there are more than 2.5 million merchant sailors. Almost 60% come from the Philippines, India, China, Russia and Indonesia. For citizens of these countries, working in the navy means guaranteeing a future. Joel decided to become an officer because he had to help his family and doing electronic engineering, which was his dream, meant one more year of studies. "For them, working eight or nine months means being able to afford a house. That's why they end up going through the motions and accepting many things. If they endure, their children will be able to study," explains Costa.This is the case of Bhabik Tandel and Haraganga Mallik, two Indian sailors who call in at Barcelona on the last Tuesday in June. It's a good trade. They earn a good living. Like Lena Rose, a 35-year-old Filipino cook who lands in the Catalan capital with the container ship Mercury, coming from Valencia. The next morning it's time to leave for Casablanca and then, sea and more sea until Israel, Egypt, and Turkey. "I'll be away from home for nine months, I've only been away for one now, so I have eight left," she explains. Lena works 12-hour shifts, preparing different salads and desserts for her colleagues every day. When she's not working, she spends her day on her mobile or watching a movie in her cabin to "relax". The worst thing about her job is the rocking, as they have to secure everything – plates, chairs, pots and pans... – so they don't shatter into a thousand pieces. That, and the loneliness and monotony. "The ship is like a prison; if you want to get out, you can't. When you're in bed, in your cabin, you keep telling yourself 'I'm alone'," she confesses.Lena Rose is part of a group of 7 Filipinos. While she is talking to the journalist, the rest are waiting for her, playing billiards at Stella Maris, an international Catholic organization that assists sailors in many ports. A few minutes later, another group of Chinese arrives to exchange dollars and visit the city. They have a few hours. They travel under the Hong Kong flag and have an Indian crew member on board. They are the third group to pass through the building that Stella Maris has in the shipyards of Barcelona. Joel and three friends were the first. The last time they had been in the Catalan capital, they had visited "la Sagrada", as they call the Sagrada Familia, and now they are asking Ricard for advice on visiting the Gothic Quarter. Ricard Rodríguez-Martos is the alma mater of the organization. He welcomes sailors – they have 32 beds at a very affordable price – and helps them during their brief stay in Barcelona, although sometimes he has seen some abandoned sailor spend months living in the modest building. He himself was a naval officer for a few years. "It's a very nice job, but it left my daughter and wife alone, with the second daughter I quit," he recalls. This is what happens to many sailors. When they want to start a family or have children, they look for alternatives closer to home. Living together many months

Ricard receives citizens from all over the world every day. He has seen it all from his small office, coordinating the van that brings the ship's crew to the Stella Maris premises. "Seafarers are needed; on board the ship, Russians and Ukrainians coexist," he argues."The most important thing is not navigation, but that people don't kill each other," points out Lleal. During the long voyages, all crammed into the cabin, there were topics that could not be discussed. Neither politics nor women. Too many hours together. Too many hours seeing the same faces. Both while working and during rest time. "Before we carried 3,000 tons and could spend weeks loading and unloading. Today we carry hundreds of thousands of tons and they are unloaded in hours. This means that the crew has practically no time to have a beer on Las Ramblas," he adds. Port stops are ephemeral. Furthermore, new ports, especially the larger ones, are infrastructures far from cities. From life. From human contact. And there isn't always a Ricard to welcome and guide them. "And fortunately, the campaigns are getting shorter and shorter. Before, they used to be 11 months at sea and one month of vacation. "This 11-1 is a translation of the mentality of working the land, but enduring 11 months on a ship is terrible because you don't have Saturdays or Sundays, there are no holidays. You work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with your watches and your shifts, and the rest environment is still the same workplace, which is the vessel," explains Víctor Jiménez, president of the council of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), who believes that there are "certain companies and crew profiles that assume" these conditions."They are miserable conditions," states Germán de Melo, president of the Spanish Merchant Navy Officers' College, without mincing words, who denounces the abuse of overtime hours there. "It is the first sector to be affected by globalization. Qualified labor is sought, but the salary, vacation, and condition requirements are not the same. For Europeans, it is no longer attractive to be on board; policies must be applied to promote the attractiveness of the profession in European Union countries," adds Jiménez.Sailors experience an isolation that affects their psychic stability. There end up being "many squabbles" and it's better to lock oneself away to "read or write" in the cabin, says Lleal, who during the 23 years he sailed around the world saw how crew members who had "gone mad", who couldn't take it anymore, had to disembark on land. "In the middle of the sea you go crazy", he recounts.When he was a merchant captain, Pep Costa learned that sailors always push the limits. Even if you have a calm disposition, you need to know how to be authoritative. But above all, you must earn the respect of your crew. They spend many months living together and, as he says, "on a ship everything works, but not everything at the same time." Therefore, there will be problems and everyone will need to row in the same direction. They have all seen and experienced fires, water leaks, rescues of shipwrecked people, or even collisions between ships in the fog of Newfoundland. That's why Costa used to take a walk around the ship every day and interact with the entire crew: "There is always someone who wants to tell you something and doesn't dare to bypass the chain of command."

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"If sea transport stopped, half the population would die of hunger and the other half of cold." This is stated by Germán de Melo, president of the Spanish Merchant Navy Officers' Association. If we look around us, more than 80% of the things that surround us have traveled by ship across the oceans that cover 70% of our planet. "In reality, we should call Earth planet Sea," states merchant captain Francesc Lleal. The sea is still largely unknown, indispensable for the global economy to function.

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Sakura exudes vitality. She also exudes maturity despite her 26 years. She speaks with passion. And she is brave. But it hasn't always been like this. For a long time, she lived with fear, guilt, and shame. And above all, pain. Sakura's childhood and adolescence were stolen from her. From the ages of 9 to 13, she suffered sexual assault by a boy five years older than her; until July 2014, when she was 14 years old, she reported it: her aggressor went to prison twelve years later, with the sentence reduced by less than half because the judicial process had dragged on too long.

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Piera, Sant Boi, Capellades, Òrrius, Gisclareny, Barruera... and so on up to fifteen fires of varying intensity across the territory, adding to the wear and tear caused by the fire that has been burning since Friday in Les Gavarres, in Empordà. That's why the Firefighters, who received more than 100 calls, issued a warning for the coming days, as long as the new heatwave that arrived yesterday, Sunday, in Catalonia lasts and is expected to continue until the end of the week. "We are entering a week in which we could have fires with speeds that exceed extinction capacity throughout the country," warned the Firefighters.

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The fire that broke out on Saturday in the town of Trevillac in Northern Catalonia forced the evacuation of more than 10,000 people. The fire has already burned more than 2,000 hectares, mainly forest, about 35 kilometers from Perpignan, and seriously injured a firefighter and a civilian. French authorities assured this Sunday afternoon that the situation is "very complicated", a consequence of the high temperatures that have been plaguing France these days and the gusts of tramontana wind that are hindering the firefighters' work. As a result, the third stage of the Tour de France, which will start from Granollers this Monday, will be affected by the fire: there will be no public or caravan. More than 750 firefighters have been working throughout the day, with the support of a dozen aerial means, to try to prevent the fire from advancing towards the Aspres massif.

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The fire in the Gavarres massif, in Empordà, is stabilized after burning more than 2,300 hectares, mostly forest mass. The Generalitat Firefighters, as President Salvador Illa has announced, have finished stabilizing the fire this Saturday night, around 10 p.m. The right flank of the flames, which was the one that worried the Firefighters the most because it was 30,000 potential hectares in the direction of Girona, had already been completely stabilized in the evening, while the left flank was "two-thirds" stabilized. A few minutes past 10 p.m., the Minister of the Interior, Núria Parlon, gave the expected news: the entire fire was stabilized, on both flanks. Therefore, a less "complicated" night is expected than the last one, when many neighbors lived in fear of the possibility that the flames would burn their homes.

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The town where it hit hardest the serious accident of a bus this Wednesday in Lleida is Aitona. Both the driver and the instructor accompanying her live in this farming town and many of the passengers in the crashed vehicle were also going to work, especially in fruit warehouses or to pick in the immense fruit fields of Baix Segrià. This midday, the town's residents approached the wife of the injured driver, Marcelo, who lost a leg in the accident and is still hospitalized at the Arnau de Vilanova Hospital, to give her encouragement. "They are a beautiful family," a neighbor summarized.

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Life goes on. At the same time. At the same place. But on a different bus. Work never stops. This Thursday, at seven in the morning, Angi, José, and Oukakalong boarded the Lleida - la Granja d'Escarp bus again, as they had done on Wednesday, the day when, suddenly, the vehicle they were traveling in crashed into the wall of the Diputació de Lleida: the "most serious" accident in the city's history, as described by the mayor of the capital of Segrià, Fèlix Larrosa. Of the 44 injured, nine people remain hospitalized, three of them in the ICU. Of these, two are in critical condition and one is stable within the severity.

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Karla took fifteen years to make the move. Half her life. It was a long time of silence. Also of shame. Even of fear. Hours of psychologists to gradually put the pieces back in place. Until she was ready to report the man who sexually assaulted and tortured her when she was just a fourteen-year-old girl.

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Close a gate at two in the afternoon. It is the only task María José had during her entire working day at the Vilanova i la Geltrú City Council. This civil servant denounces that the administration has kept her for three years without doing any "effective" work after she had uncovered irregularities with the social rental fund deposits. They have moved her to various departments and she has always felt "isolated": she has been on sick leave since October and has several open proceedings with the Garraf council. "I have gone up to seven hours without doing anything. I want a dignified job, that I am not considered furniture, but part of a team," she laments.

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"I like what I do, it satisfies me", confesses Andrea with a smile. This 30-year-old Colombian calls herself a luxury "escort" or companion. Not everyone sees it that way: for a large part of society, Andrea is engaged in prostitution and the use of the term "escort" is just a euphemism. She has been living in Barcelona for five years. She works during the day in her apartment in the Eixample, very central, next to her sister. Both are dedicated to the same thing. They advertise on platforms like Escort Advisor and accept requests from clients they choose. "The day I don't want to work, no one forces me to", she says.

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In late July 2025, Sigrid received the first notification from the Barcelona City Council. When she read it, she began to tremble and had an anxiety attack. Forty-five years after buying the apartment, the council of the Catalan capital informed her that her home could not be used as a dwelling, as municipal archives state that the building has industrial use. Like her, the sixty or so residents of this building on Rosselló street – in the Eixample Left – have lived in limbo ever since. "My first lawyer told me: 'You could come home and find everything sealed, and not be able to enter. They can kick you out of your home,'" recounts Sigrid. From the City Council, however, they assure that efforts are being made to avoid this extreme.

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Up to 78 burglaries in houses and, in addition, five set on fire. This is what is attributed to two young men who in the autumn of 2024 alerted the Horta de Lleida, an area separate from the city. Finally, after arresting the first person involved in July 2025, the Mossos d'Esquadra have managed to arrest the alleged second perpetrator of the acts, a 24-year-old man with a dozen police records. The arrest, however, was not easy.

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They skim over the water at over 110 km/h, surfing on the waves, with the bow making playful leaps. Since the 90s, they were responsible for introducing hashish from Morocco. Now the narcolanches also carry cocaine that arrives in the Iberian Peninsula through Africa. The National Police and the Civil Guard have already seized some of these vessels. The officers thought there was hashish, and the bales, in reality, carried white powder. "The speedboats are increasingly carrying more cocaine," admits Lisardo Capote, head of the Customs Surveillance Service (SVA) in the Campo de Gibraltar.

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The same day that the artist and writer Paula Bonet reported on Instagram that her gallery where she works had been destroyed, her stalker also posted on social media a photograph of a giant hammer accompanied by a text in which he assured that "the purpose of the aggression is domination, not destruction". And a few hours later, the man added two more posts. In the first, holding the book El fin del amor by Eva Illouz; in the second, he is seen looking at the camera with the text "Get over it. Move on". The man was released a few days before the attack on the gallery and after having been in preventive detention since July 2025, when he entered Bonet's La Madriguera workshop, breaking down the door, stealing a necklace and leaving a message written on the blackboard.

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Captain Swing has translated into Spanish the 15 years of work of journalist Toby Muse in Colombia reporting on drug trafficking. In Kilo: The Secret World of the Cocaine Cartels, this London-born reporter tries to recover – with the help of translator Victoria Pradilla – the English journalism of American authors from the 70s, such as Joan Didion, Michael Herr or Tom Wolfe.

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In March, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office requested information from the Office of Fraud Prevention regarding the investigations being carried out on the former Directorate General of Childhood and Adolescence (DGAIA) and the alleged irregularities in the granting and control of economic and housing benefits received by former wards. El ARA has been able to confirm that the Special Prosecutor's Office against Corruption and Organized Crime is investigating the case, although in a still very "incipient" stage of proceedings.

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A minor killed a man this Saturday night in the center of Barcelona. The events happened at midnight, and later the Guardia Urbana arrested the perpetrator of the stabbing. As of today, according to police sources, everything indicates that the alleged author of the crime – who was with his partner – would have been robbed by a group that included the victim. After the robbery, a few meters away, on Cera street, in El Raval, it would have escalated to a stabbing.

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