With an initial investment of 6.7 million euros in 2026, Barcelona City Council will launch a plan that seeks to reclaim "the city's democratic, social, and feminist tradition." To this end, it has presented a roadmap that will be rolled out until 2030 and which, among other things, foresees the creation of the Model Memorial Center, where the political repression, social conflict, penal control, and democratic struggles of the 20th century will be explained. It is, therefore, a new Center for the Interpretation of Terrorism, which will primarily focus on the Hipercor (1987) and La Rambla (2017) attacks, at the "Montjuïc Castle; and the Center for the Interpretation of Labor in Barcelona, in the old Fabra i Coats factory.

The Center of Contemporary History of Catalonia (CHCC) was created in March 1984 with the aim of promoting the study and dissemination of historical research. The ambition of Josep Benet, its first director, was to recover, above all, the memory of the history of Catalanism. Another challenge was to help young researchers and promote the dissemination of their research. When the Museum of History of Catalonia was inaugurated, the CHCC moved to the same building. They shared the space but nothing else.

During the presentation of the book La intriga del funeral inconveniente, Eduardo Mendoza caused quite a stir by asking for Saint George to disappear from the celebration: "I'm campaigning to stop relating April 23rd with Saint George – he assured –. For me it's Book Day and that's it. Saint George was an animal abuser who surely couldn't read. He's not the patron saint of writers or anything like that. He's a guy who has appropriated the holiday," he claimed. This Wednesday, Mariscal agreed with him. The truth is that Saint George is many centuries older than Book Day.

The German newspaper Die Zeit has made available to its readers an online search engine that allows you to find out in a matter of seconds if there is a Nazi in your family. The search engine is based on historical files of members of the Nazi Party (NSDAP), and by entering first and last names, you can find out if the person in question was affiliated with the regime. The search engine provides information from different archives. Between 1925 and 1945, 10.2 million Germans joined the NSDAP. Shortly before the end of the war, the party leadership ordered the destruction of all files – about 50 tons of paper – by transferring them from their headquarters to Munich, to a paper mill in the Freimann district. However, the miller Hanns Huber stopped the destruction upon realizing what he held in his hands.

"With headphones, music, and everything else, it touched me deeply," says a student from IES Terra Roja in Santa Coloma de Gramenet after the performance ofEl sonall, which can be seen until April 26 at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya. This immersive show, with live music (some paragraphs from a doctoral thesis are even read to the rhythm of rap), recounts the investigation of a real case: that of Catalina Muñoz. Mother of four, she was 37 years old when the Francoists executed her at the beginning of the Civil War. Some neighbors had accused her of making proclamations in favor of the Republic, and her husband had fled after confronting Falangists. When she was murdered, she was carrying the rattle of her youngest son, Martín, who was nine months old at the time. When archaeologists exhumed her grave, in La Carcavilla Park (Palencia), they found the small toy along with some buttons and the soles of her rubber shoes.

Claudia Durastanti was born in Brooklyn, emigrated to a small town in southern Italy at the age of six, then lived in London and returned to the United States. She now lives in Rome. With L'estrangera, she was a finalist for the Strega Prize and the Prix Fémina, won the Strega Off Prize and the PEN Award, and was featured among the best books of the year by The New Yorker magazine. Missitàlia (L'Altra Editorial / Anagrama; translated by Mercè Ubach) is a historical journey that goes from the south of Risorgimento Italy to an imagined future on the Moon. There is nothing conventional in this book, where the protagonists are women who live on the fringes, and which combines genres such as western, espionage, dystopia, or intrigue.

Officially, the Spanish Civil War ended on April 1, 1939, with the victory of the rebel faction led by Franco, who signed the last war report in Burgos. The Francoists had won on the front, but the fall of the Second Republic was also prepared from the rear. The Information and Military Police Service (SIPM) played a central role in controlling propaganda, diplomacy, and the decomposition of the enemy from within.

The Valencian poet, narrator, essayist, columnist, and translator, Josep Piera (Beniopa, 1947), has died at the age of 78. He considered himself primarily a poet, but he left a handful of memorable prose books, among which are El cingle verd (Destino, 1982) – for which he won the Josep Pla prize–, Estiu grec (Destino, 1985), and Ací s'acaba tot (Edicions 62, 1993), which the young publisher Cap de Brot reissued in a corrected and expanded version. In 2023, he received the 55th Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Catalanes (Honorary Prize for Catalan Literature), awarded by Òmnium Cultural. At that time, he expressed his astonishment at receiving the award and how he understood literature: "I find this writing in the name of everyone to be extraordinarily presumptuous. One writes about what one knows, what one feels, and about oneself. But this must become shareable, symbolic. Otherwise, what the hell can interest others? This is where literature comes in, and I am an animal of words," he stated.

The Valencian poet, narrator, essayist, columnist, and translator, Josep Piera (Beniopa, Gandía, 1947), has passed away at the age of 78. He considered himself primarily a poet, but he left behind a handful of memorable prose books, including El cingle verd (Destino, 1982) – with which he won the Josep Pla award – Estiu grec (Destino, 1985) and Ací s'acaba tot (Edicions 62, 1993), which the young publishing house Cap de Brot reissued in a corrected and expanded version. In 2023, he received the 55th Honorary Award for Catalan Literature, presented by Òmnium Cultural. At that time, he expressed his astonishment at receiving the award and how he understood literature: "This business of writing on behalf of everyone seems extraordinarily presumptuous to me. One writes about what one knows, what one feels, and about oneself. But that must become shareable, symbolic. Otherwise, why on earth would it interest others? This is where literature comes in, and I am an animal of words," he assured.

Penelope Fitzgerald (Lincoln, 1916 - London, 2000) began writing in 1975, when she was 58 years old. She debuted with a biography of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, and later wrote another about her father and uncles (the Knox brothers). Two years later, she published the novel The golden child, a detective story set in an antiquities museum that satirizes the bureaucracy and absurdities of the art world. This was followed by other splendid works such as Innocence (1986), set in Florence with Gramsci as a secondary character, and The beginning of spring (1988), which narrates the life of an Englishman exiled in Moscow.

The cave of Santa Llúcia, one kilometre from La Bisbal de Montsant (Priorat), holds many stories. Neighboring the wild Prades mountains, it is a shallow but large cave that housed a makeshift hospital during the Battle of the Ebro. We now know for certain that nearly fifty wounded Republican soldiers who passed through, most of them very young, could not survive. All of them were buried in a mass grave in the town's cemetery, which the Directorate General of Democratic Memory has been exhuming in recent months. It is estimated that practically all of them must have died during the first week of the Battle of the Ebro, between the early morning of July 25, 1938, when the Ebro Army, commanded by Juan Modesto Guilloto, launched the Republican offensive, and July 31. "When the army crossed the river, other emergency hospitals were created on the other side of the Ebro and the most seriously wounded were treated elsewhere," assures historian Jordi Martí.

Jaume Font Marí-Martí (Terrassa, 1918-2010) was so discreet that he practically never spoke about his clandestine struggle or how he infiltrated the Francoist military judicial machinery to alter records and save lives. "I had to pull many strings. He only spoke to me about it once. We were walking through Cerdanya with some friends, we were teenagers. Without looking directly at anyone, almost contemplating the landscape, my father explained that after the Civil War he had worked at the War Auditor's Office and that he had risked a lot by altering documents to reduce sentences or avoid death penalties. It was an unexpected and brief revelation. No one asked any questions. The conversation stopped there and he never spoke of it again," says his daughter, Núria Font.

The Majorcan poet and narrator Carles Rebassa (Palma, 1977), won the Sant Jordi prize with Prometeu de mil maneres(Univers), a book that shows the violence of the world of work and, at the same time, a tempestuous relationship that ends in tragedy. It is the second novel by the writer and poet, who in 2016 debuted in narrative with Eren ells (Angle) and in 2018 already won the Carles Riba prize for poetry with Sons bruts.

There is nothing innocent about confusing antisemitism with anti-Zionism. Italian semiologist Valentina Pisanty (Milan, 1969) asks a rather provocative question at the beginning of Antisemita! (Comanegra, translated by Marta Nin): "How is it possible that in the name of the memory of the Holocaust we have collectively thrown open the doors to the return of ultranationalists in Europe and their consolidation in Israel?" A professor at the University of Bergamo and author of essays on interpretive semiotics, fairy tales, humor, political discourse, the rhetoric of racism, and memory, she analyzes how the use of the word antisemite has changed. Pisanty argues that the word antisemite "has been hijacked" by the Israeli right with the support of many international organizations officially tasked with fighting racism and antisemitism. All of this, together, according to Pisanty, with the approval of almost all Western governments.

In July 1348, there was a terrible massacre in the Jewish quarter of Tàrrega. We know its scope from the documentation of the Royal Chancellery, the account of Josef ha-Kohen, The Valley of Tears, and the excavations in the mass graves carried out in 2007 at the Roquetes site. Both children and women, adults and the elderly died, and in that indiscriminate and furious attack, swords, axes, other types of bladed weapons and tools, and stones were used. The bone remains show extreme violence and atrocious beatings. For the first time, we also have the origin and composition of their DNA. A study by the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB)  promoted by the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya, which has been published in Genes, has for the first time traced the genetic history of a medieval Jewish community in the Iberian Peninsula. Until now, none had been done for this community before their expulsion in 1492.

Without the persistence of the editor Maria Carme Dalmau, we would surely be missing many reference works on the history and heritage of Catalonia today. She worked a great deal, even during the greyness and repression of Francoism, to publicize and make accessible to the public books that explained the country's past, geography, and traditions. And she did so by overcoming very significant legal and economic obstacles. She circumvented censorship by devising a thousand and one stratagems. Born in Barcelona in 1930, the editor died this Thursday at the age of 96.

Numerous studies, investigations, and excavations have allowed us to learn increasingly more about the history of Barcino, the Roman colony founded by Emperor Augustus in the 1st century. We can learn about their diet, how they cultivated oysters, how they bid farewell to the dead and which gods they worshipped, how they planned their streets, and how they built them. Research also demonstrates that nothing is immutable and that everything is open to debate. And debate took place this Tuesday during archaeologist Jordi Amorós's lecture on... the biggest archaeological find in the last thirty years in BarcelonaA monumental pavement from the Barcelona forum. A hundred people, many of them archaeologists and historians, filled the El Born auditorium, and more than fifty people followed the event via live stream.

Behind the stone walls of the Pedralbes Monastery, countless generations of women have lived for seven centuries. Each corridor holds many stories, not only of prayer and introspective silence, but also of struggles, conspiracies, survival, and creativity. It is a rare and ancient place because neither the confiscations of church property, nor revolutions, nor dictatorships, nor even the voracious appetite for real estate, have been able to swallow it up. Those who entered were required to take vows of obedience, chastity, and poverty, but for a long time it was a space where patriarchal power could be transcended. This year it celebrates its 700th anniversary with exhibitions, panel discussions, and the revelation of many of the secrets hidden within the tombs of a queen and the ladies who accompanied her. We invite you to explore all the spaces of the monastery through the lives of seven women, some powerful, others very humble.

"Can you give me one last recommendation? Don't tell me the title. My mother will take the book; that way, when I get home from training, I'll find a surprise," a young man says to Cecilia Picún, who is constantly giving hugs, recommending books, and taking pictures with all the customers who came to buy a book today. She knows everyone's name. The customers and their children. Today, Friday, Librerío de la Plata closes its doors. Picún announced more than a month ago that her lease would not be renewed. She wanted to continue until her retirement in 2027, but it wasn't possible.

The Archaeological Complex of TarracoThe Plaça del Rei, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000, is one of the most important testimonies to the Roman presence on the Iberian Peninsula and in the western Mediterranean. It is an invaluable heritage, and the institutions that preserve it have experienced some turbulent years. The National Archaeological Museum of Tarragona (MNAT) closed the Plaça del Rei space in 2018, and eight years later, the plan is to reopen it at the end of 2026 with a new museography after an investment of more than 9.2 million euros. Meanwhile, the NecropolisThe site, containing 2,051 tombs spanning from the 3rd to the mid-5th century, is also undergoing renovations, with an investment of 8.9 million euros. This open-air burial complex is the most important in the Mediterranean and was already closed for an extended period, from 1992 to 2012. It is expected to partially reopen in June. These are just some of the challenges facing Elena Juncosa, who in January took over from Mònica Borrell At the helm of the MNAT. Selected through a public competition, she was director of the Mas Miró Foundation (2015-2025), and will be responsible for managing not only the museum and the necropolis, but also all the dependent monuments and archaeological sites: the Tarraco theater, the Tower of the Scipios, the Mèdolc quarry, the old town, and the Arch of Berà.