There are stories that remain buried in the depths of the sea, not just under tons of water, but also under a thick layer of secrets and litigation. The galleon San José left Cartagena de Indias (Colombia) on May 29, 1708, with tons of gold, silver, and precious stones that the Spanish had extracted from America. The destination was Cádiz, and the Bourbons were anxiously awaiting its arrival because the coffers were quite empty due to the War of Succession. The ship, with 600 crew members, never reached its destination: the British, who also coveted the gold and silver, were lying in wait and sank it near the Rosario Islands, in the Caribbean. The treasure, which is not documented, went to the bottom of the sea with all the crew and has since fueled a host of legends. Even Gabriel García Márquez mentions it in Love in the Time of Cholera.

From the present, it may seem that we have never lived in such a dark era, with such an uncertain future and such accumulated hopelessness. If one looks back, however, insurrection has often taken hold of the streets of Barcelona. Sometimes, the response has been fierce repression—including executions—and without any victory for the insurgents. Other times, citizen mobilization has brought down governments and caused irreversible changes. In fact, many current rights would not exist without great mobilizations.

There is a historiographical narrative that maintains that before LGBTI liberation movements, in the grey Barcelona of the Franco regime, there was practically nothing: only silence, darkness, and persecution that would have prevented any attempt to live sexual freedom outside the home. However, the research of Geoffroy Huard (Paris, 1982) disproves this thesis. A professor of contemporary history at the University of Cergy-Paris and a specialist in the history of sexual and gender dissidence in contemporary Spain, Huard has participated in the conference on the history of sexual and gender diversity in Barcelona during the Franco regime, organized by the Barcelona History Museum.

Can it happen that a character "possesses" its creator? This is what happens to Benedict Newman, a millionaire and bestselling writer, who faints while looking at photographs of a murder and wakes up turned into the detective of his own novels: Colt Stark. Nash Elizondo, the character created by Dolores Redondo (San Sebastián, 1969), is the one who will have to find out if Newman is innocent or could be involved in a series of crimes. The Basque writer, author of books such as those of the Baztan trilogy, returns to bookstores with Totes les nits, totes les ciutats (Columna/Destino; translated into Catalan by Núria Parés Sellarès), a novel in which she immerses herself in identity disorders but also plays with many more literary resources to hook the reader.

At the Pazo de Meirás, before it became public property, there were many paintings of Franco in uniform and in a pose of launching himself into conquest; of his wife, Carmen Polo, all bejeweled and serious, as if she were about to scold someone, and colorful still lifes of flowers painted by the dictator. The images of the dictator with his unleashed ego – there were portraits of him in practically every room – coexisted with the gazes of dead animals he had hunted that hung on the walls.

"Now Barcelona is my home. Thanks to this museum, I will continue to live eternally. Speak my name, Iny; only then will I be able to continue living eternally. Bring me bread, beer, even geese, if you find any". The one who speaks like this is no fictional character, but Iny, an Egyptian of humble origin who climbed to the core of power during the reigns of Pepi I, Merenre I, and Pepi II. Now, four millennia later, it is he who takes the visitor by the hand to guide them to the Egypt of the 6th Dynasty in the first immersive venture of the Egyptian Museum of Barcelona: Iny, the pharaoh's explorer.

In 1884, there was a trial in England that changed the history of law. The defendants were Captain Thomas Dudley and officer Edwin Stephens, who, after having been shipwrecked and adrift for weeks in the middle of the Atlantic, decided that the only option to survive was to kill the cabin boy Richard Parker and eat him. Adam Cohen, a Harvard law graduate and journalist for the New York Times and Time, reconstructs the story and the trial in The Captain's Dinner (Arpa, 2026).

There is a traditional historiography and some recently published books that argue that everything began with the Goths. At school, many generations had to memorize the endless list of their kings to consolidate an official narrative that saw in those Germanic elites the first stone of the future Spanish state. Genetically, however, their impact was much smaller, as demonstrated by an international study led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), the Natural Sciences Museum of Barcelona, Harvard University, and the University of the Basque Country (EHU), and published in the journal Cell.

Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco (Granada, 1978), historian and professor at the University of Granada, has been awarded the 2026 National History Prize of Spain, granted by the Ministry of Culture and endowed with 30,000 euros, for his work The Spanish Famine: Victory and Death in the Post-war Period (Crítica). The award focuses on research that dismantles the official version that the dictatorship spread for decades. In the book, the historian explains how all the great famines of the 20th century are related to political decisions. "In Spain, it was a weapon of war against the defeated," the historian stated to ARA when he published the book.

Patricia Jordan was 21 years old and had just graduated from the Geneva School of Interpretation when she was selected to work as an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials. It was the first time in history that simultaneous translation was used. "Speaking into a microphone while simultaneously hearing a disembodied voice through headphones was something deeply unsettling. It was my first job and the most important one. I went there with the innocent enthusiasm of my 21 years. When I returned home four months later, I had aged ten years, and yes, I was already an interpreter," Jordan wrote.

Human remains that can offer a lot of data about our past, sediments with a lot of information about what was eaten centuries ago, textile machines, computers, amphorae, tombstones, sculptures, paintings, murals, capitals, clothes, fossils, stones, seeds, bullets, pitchers... If we were to add up the heritage guarded by Catalan museums, the figure would reach eight million pieces. It is an unreachable and heterogeneous collection of which the public only sees a very small part in the exhibition halls; the rest, the vast majority, remains invisible in warehouses and depots.

Writer Sofia Andrukhovych (Ukraine, 1982) continues to try, despite the war, to write from Kyiv. These days she is in Barcelona to talk about memory, trauma, and creation in times of conflict at the Biennial of Thought, and to present The story of Romana and Uliana. Amadoca (Salamandra), translated into Spanish by Olga Korobenko. Originally conceived in three interconnected parts (the story of Romana, the story of Uliana, and the story of Sofia), the Spanish edition includes only the first two books. Through family memories and intense love stories, the author, daughter of the writer Yuri Andrukhovych, covers the Stalinist repression, the Holocaust, and the war in the Donbas.

"Challenging the narrative of the far right". This was the title of the debate organized on Thursday by the Biennal de Pensament and the CRÍTIC School of Thought, at the former La Model prison. It is clear that the public is not indifferent to everything surrounding this issue: the venue was at full capacity with more than 200 people, and about thirty attendees—mostly young people—were left outside.

On October 15, 1940, at 6:30 in the morning, 86 years ago today, at the Santa Eulàlia moat, a firing squad killed President Lluís Companys. On November 8, 1940, three weeks after the assassination of Companys by order of General Franco, the government of the Republic of Mexico sent its heartfelt condolences to his widow, Carme Ballester. This is demonstrated by a letter, hitherto unpublished, which the Associació Memòria i Història de Manresa is publishing this Thursday. In the missive, the secretary of the Mexican legation in Paris, Bernardo Reyes, expressed to her a message of solidarity and recognition:

Hollywood has made multiple versions about Billy the Kid: from King Vidor's 1930 one to Sam Peckinpah's 1973 one, without forgetting the interpretation Paul Newman gave in 1958. But the surgical gaze of the French writer Éric Vuillard (Lyon, 1968) shows another type of violence, far removed from any romanticism. After narrating the French Revolution from the point of view of the people on the street in 14 July (2016), and unmasking the great economic powers that made possible the rise of Nazism in The Order of the Day (Goncourt Prize 2017), Vuillard returns to put the magnifying glass on the dirty laundry of power in The Desperate Ones. A History of Billy the Kid (Edicions 62 / Tusquets), with a Catalan translation by Jordi Martín Lloret.

In the Spanish state there are still thousands of people searching for their relatives buried in mass graves. The historian Arnau Fernández Pasalodos (Barcelona, 1995) has interviewed great-grandchildren of those murdered and explains his own story and his complaint to the Huesca courts in the book Did your great-grandfather kill mine? How the trauma of the Civil War and Francoism has spanned four generations (Crítica). Because the trauma of the war reaches the fourth generation.

Getting an interview with Shakira is not easy at all, and Thursday's episode of La revuelta, on RTVE, was proof of that. According to David Broncano's team, they received confirmation of the meeting with only one day's notice and an appointment at 5 p.m. at Macondo Park, the Madrid complex where the artist holds her concerts. Without time to prepare a set or a conventional setup, always according to La revuelta, the presenter, who decided to show the whole process, grabbed a sandwich, a bottle of water, and a small team to head to the venue.

Alicia Giménez Bartlett (Almansa, 1951), the great lady of crime fiction, returns with a new intrigue starring the iconic inspector Petra Delicado. She, who is one of the first female police officers in Spanish literature, having been born in the pages of Ritos de muerte (1996) thirty years ago now, faces grief and the power of the Church in Bajo el cielo infernal (Destino).

Taking a trip back in time, landing on a night fifty thousand years ago in a rock shelter in the current municipality of Capellades (Anoia) and observing how a score of Neanderthals live and sleep requires imagination, but archaeology can help a lot. And the Abric Romaní in Capellades is an exceptional setting for doing so, because during forty years of research it has been possible to study Neanderthal occupations from approximately 62,000 to 40,000 years ago. That is to say, more than 20,000 years of prehistory.

The Black Ball has demonstrated the Javis' ability to connect with mainstream audiences on topics that until recently were quite marginal. The film's phenomenon goes beyond the award at Cannes and the audience awards at the Toronto and San Sebastian festivals: it attracts audiences in droves to theaters. It debuted with 4.7 million euros in its first three days and more than 610,000 viewers, exceptional figures. In two weeks it has reached 2 million viewers and almost 15 million euros in box office revenue.