Christopher Nolan's Odyssey lasts 2 hours and 53 minutes. Almost three hours of epic footage to narrate Ulysses' adventures for ten years, from when he leaves the shores of Troy until he finally returns to Ithaca. The film covers practically all the essential episodes and themes of Homer's poem, the foundational work of the journey myth, created from oral tradition about 2,800 years ago. But, like any adaptation (or reinterpretation), it is by no means exact: the filmmaker alters the order of some passages, summarizes others, and eliminates important scenes that, in the original text, add nuances and help to understand the protagonist's psychological depth. These are the most significant.

The Lloret de Mar forest fire of 1979 is the deadliest in the history of the State. 21 people died there. Residents of the Los Pinares urbanization, frightened by the flames, fled their homes and, like the victims of the deadly fire in Almeria this July, they put themselves in the wolf's throat without being able to escape the fire.

First great opera night of the summer in Empordà. The Festival Peralada has inaugurated its 40th anniversary edition with an excellent recital, starring two great stars of the international lyrical scene: soprano Ermonela Jaho and tenor Benjamin Bernheim, who, accompanied by pianist Marco Madrigal, offered a brilliant journey through arias and songs by Italian and French composers of the late 19th century Romanticism and Verismo.

After 30 years living and working in New York, the artist Lluís Lleó (Barcelona, 1961) has decided to settle in Empordà. In Serra de Daró, between Montgrí Castle and the Iberian settlement of Ullastret, he has his studio, which occupies half of a large, open, and spacious industrial warehouse with a very high ceiling, from where he continues to explore new lines of creation, on the hybrid border between painting, sculpture, and installation. With one foot in the Empordà plain, but always with an open gaze to the world, Lleó boasts a first-class international career. While working with gallerists and curators from Mexico and Venice, this July he has just inaugurated at the AWL gallery in GironaVeure amb les mans (Seeing with hands), an exhibition of very powerful pieces, which are a very vivid reflection of his current moment of maturity.

Like every summer, for a month, from the end of July to the end of August, Torroella de Montgrí once again becomes the musical capital of Baix Empordà. During the tourist season of major festivals on the Costa Brava, filled with media names and magnificent stars, the Torroella event, at the foot of the Montgrí massif, keeps its identity alive with 16 classical music concerts, from Baroque to contemporary proposals, very interesting and of a high level. Of the entire program of this 46th edition, which is presented under the slogan Love also leaves a trace, ARA recommends, with the help of renowned personalities from the world of culture, six unmissable concerts for summer nights.

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.

Jordi Savall (Igualada, 1941) has spent decades exploring the history of music from a deeply humanistic, rigorous, and open perspective, building bridges between peoples and traditions through centuries of shared musical heritage. On July 10th, he will present at the Occident Porta Ferrada FestivalThe Silk Road, a proposal that, coinciding with the seventh centenary of Marco Polo's death, musically retraces the Venetian merchant's journey between 1271 and 1295. Led by the historicist ensemble Hespèrion XXI and a cast of soloists from around the world, Savall proposes a musical itinerary that crosses the Eastern Mediterranean, Armenia, Persia, China, Sri Lanka, and the Tatar steppes.

The most critical point of the Les Gavarres fire is the right flank, as, if it breaks loose over Puig d'Arques, it could cover thousands of hectares of forest land all the way to Girona. Where the most tense moments have been experienced, however, has been on the left flank, close to the urban areas of Calonge and Santa Cristina d'Aro. On Friday afternoon and night, the flames, pushed by the sea breeze, descended to the edge of the houses and the residents spent hours in authentic terror. In the urbanizations of Cabanyes and Mas Toi, residents fled in their cars, spent the night in the open, and the fire burned a house, gateways, gardens, and fences.

Despite the express instructions from Civil Protection to avoid any unnecessary travel to avoid worsening the uncontrolled fire still burning in the Gavarres, Cap Roig maintained its inaugural concert with Bryan Adams on its billboard. The surrounding towns, which did have a confinement order, canceled their schedules following the authorities' recommendations, but the prestigious festival of the la Caixa Foundation was held with absolute normality, full of tourists and vacationers, oblivious to the magnitude of the tragedy that is increasingly affecting the wooded area of the forest massif inland. The smoke and flames were certainly far from the idyllic gardens of Calella de Palafrugell, but, at dusk, a gray and reddish veil blurred the horizon before the first notes of the Canadian singer, who had the courtesy to ask for a round of applause in recognition of the firefighters' work.  

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.

Every year, after Saint John's Day, at the beginning of summer, a group of about twenty adolescents between 12 and 16 years old spend a week in the mountains, in Alta Garrotxa, accompanied by a team of monitors specialized in adventure sports. They go to the Ribelles camps, near the Sant Aniol river, about a three-hour walk from the Sadernes parking lot. During all these days, they do a lot of outdoor activities and live completely isolated, disconnected from their mobile phones, in tents, eating under a tent and without showers or toilets. This 2026, the camps celebrate their 40th anniversary and on July 4th they will organize a big party with a popular rice dish and live music for over 70 guests.

This Friday, July 3rd, arrives in theaters Magellan, the new film by Filipino Lav Diaz, one of the most radical directors of contemporary auteur cinema. The film, starring Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, narrates, from the perspective of the colonized peoples, the adventures of the Spanish expedition to the East that the Portuguese navigator Fernão de Magalhães led in 1519. It is an international co-production, winner of the Seminci of Valladolid in 2025, which has the participation of the producer by Albert Serra, Andergraun Films.

A year ago, the Generalitat de Catalunya, the Ministry of Transport, the City Council of Figueres and Adif seal the agreement to move the Figueres train station from the center, currently the commuter and medium-distance services arrive at the high-speed train station site, next to Vilafant. The plan, with a total investment exceeding 150 million euros, foresees the construction of a railway bypass and the unification of all train services on the outskirts, to the northwest of the city, in a single intermodal station. This will allow the dismantling of the tracks that cross the urban center at ground level, which cause mobility problems due to level crossings and disturbances to nearby houses. The project's drafting has already been awarded and work is progressing according to the planned schedule.

In Girona, near the border between the neighborhoods of Can Gibert del Pla and Santa Eugènia, a very unique apartment block stands out, surrounded by a tree-lined park. It is a building made entirely of wood, with checkered and symmetrical shapes, featuring two forty-meter facades and open galleries on each of its six floors. The block, inaugurated in 2022, is called 6x6 and is the work of the Girona-based studio Bosch Capdeferro, which has received numerous awards for the project's sustainability and energy efficiency values.

At the gates of the summer season, bars and restaurants in Port de la Selva (Alt Empordà) are returning to normal. Last August, the season ended abruptly with the suicide of a local business couple who had been managing a dozen establishments for decades through an investment group. The businesses, which were struggling with financial problems, closed overnight, leaving a hundred workers jobless. They represented 20% of the town's hospitality businesses, and the offerings along the entire promenade were severely affected.

The Ministry for Ecological Transition has issued a favorable environmental impact statement for the floating offshore wind test platform that the Generalitat is promoting in the Gulf of Roses, named Plemcat. The resolution, which will be published in the BOE in the coming hours, represents the main administrative step pending for the initiative to continue its processing and move towards the tendering phase.

On Tuesday, June 23, the eve of Sant Joan, Cadaqués will wake up early to a very unique and evocative artistic experience. At five in the morning, before sunrise, the spectacular rock of Cucurucuc, located at the tip of the bay, beyond s'Arnella beach, will become the floating stage for a

Claron McFadden is one of the most prestigious sopranos on the contemporary classical music scene. Recognized for her ability to move naturally between opera, improvisation, and performanceunique. The North American soprano Claron McFadden will perform The performance as Cucurucuc is part of an initiative promoted by the Venetian festival Microclima (Cinema Galleggiante Venezia), in collaboration with Cosmogram and the Arxipèlag cycle. The proposal is complemented, on Monday, June 22, by the screening at the Art i Joia Theater of three experimental cinema pieces: Devenir, by Eugènia Balcells; Aqueronte, by Manuel Muñoz Rivas, and The very eye of the night, by Maya Deren.

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For a few weeks now, Banyoles has had one of the most relevant artistic facilities in the Girona region. It is the new Art Center, located in Plaça Major, which has opened its doors with a selection of 76 works by some of the great names in art history, especially Catalan and Spanish, such as Antoni Tàpies, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Eduardo Chillida, Antonio Saura, Marià Fortuny, Josep Llimona and Miquel Barceló. The project has been possible thanks to the generosity of the 93-year-old Banyoles collector Jordi Gimferrer, who in 2023 he formalized the donation of his private collection, among the most valuable and interesting in all of Catalonia, to the Banyoles Town Hall so that it could be exhibited publicly and permanently.

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A week ago, Adam and his friends took a guided jet ski tour from Roses beach.However, for reasons still under investigation, as the sun set, the sixteen-year-old did not return to shore with the rest of the group. Seven days later, he remains missing. Only his jet ski was found, off the coast of Pals, about 25 kilometers south of the departure point, with a strong impact.

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For years, in Girona, on the Onyar river, there have been some small animals that arouse great curiosity among residents and visitors. They are coypus, large rodents, over two spans long, that swim among the carp and forage along the water's edge. They are not only present in the Girona river, but also in the Sils ponds, the Empordà wetlands, and along the entire bank of the Baix Ter. They arrived in the Girona regions from France, as a result of human activity linked to the fur industry, and have spread throughout the province to areas in the south like La Selva. Despite their cute and harmless appearance, with very large orange front teeth, these animals pose a problem for the natural ecosystem, as they are an invasive species, one of the most harmful in all of Europe, which damages flora and alters the habitats of native mammals. They are herbivores and feed on large quantities of vegetation, so they also cause damage to crops, especially wheat and rice in wetlands.  

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