After it was discovered in 1931 that Ullastret had Iberian remains from the 6th to 2nd centuries BC, the Republican Generalitat made an unusual decision for the time: to protect the site without even having started any excavation. As explained by the current head of the Ullastret site of the Museum of Archaeology of Catalonia, Gabriel de Prado, this was not common practice, but they must have been aware of its importance. “Since then, hundreds of excavations have been carried out, giving the city a dimension that the first researchers little imagined,” says Prado.

Actor Jordi Vidal, known for shows like Guillermotta, Estimadíssims malvats and For Evita, has a luxury literary recommender: his brother Xavier is the founder of the Nollegiu bookstore. "I trust everything he recommends," he points out. For the readers of ARA, he chooses the latest book recommended by his brother: Punt d'aranya, by the Galician author Nerea Pallares, published in Spanish by Libros del Asteroide and in Catalan by Edicions del Periscopi – with translation by Eduard Velasco. "I really liked it for the mix of female power and Galician legends," says Vidal, who avoids giving too many plot details to avoid spoilers, although the author did in this interview with ARA, in which she also denounced that women are not allowed "to be angry or violent."

The August nights at the Vilabertran Schubertiad are always a guarantee of quality and excellence. Even more so when the program features baritone Andrè Schuen, one of today's great lied specialists, a fixture in the Empordà festival's programming since his debut there in 2018. This year he starred in a particularly brilliant and original recital alongside his usual pianist, Daniel Heide, and the Terrassa-born actor Pere Arquillué, who acted as narrator.

The jury of the Pole Spain tournament, an international pole dance competition, disqualified a Catalan group in mid-May for a performance they considered "inappropriate content", as reported by Eldiario.es. According to a statement published by the competition organization, they decided to eliminate the group from the competition because they used "a large Nazi symbol as the main element on stage along with performing Nazi salutes" during the performance. The jury argues that "these types of images can be deeply offensive and disturbing to many people", which is why they made "a collective decision taking into account the competition environment, the impact on the audience, and the event's standards". "We believe that the image used went beyond what was necessary to convey the narrative or artistic message of the performance," they add.

"I deleted Tinder and Instagram and downloaded Substack #summer", I read in a post. Substack is a platform that, in fact, demands time. The posts that are uploaded there, and that are also sent as an email newsletter to subscribers, are sheets full of information, references, and data, especially if they are paid. And since it increasingly contains a more extensive and diverse offer, your linked readings and emails multiplyto the inbox. "I'm joining Substack because I missed blogs. It's the network for those looking for a new space, more depth, less noise, less presence of the turbo-fascist companies that have been taking over and conditioning how we interact on X, Instagram, and Facebook," says writer and comedian Maria Rovira.

The previous plague epidemic in Mallorca had been in 1652. Almost 200 years later, in May 1820, the plague returned to the island. The disease arrived on board a ship from Tangier which clandestinely disembarked on the coasts of Son Servera. Until now, historiography had described it as a late case of classical bubonic plague: the disease transmitted by infected rats and passed on to humans through the bite of rodent fleas. A study led by the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), published in the scientific journal the scientific journal PNAS, has overturned the version. The data show that rats had nothing to do with it and that the plague spread directly between humans at a devastating speed.

At a clandestine party at Les Tres Xemeneies del Besòs, Nico, a young dancer, is found dead. His sister, Lola (Zoe Bonafonte), 17, must delve into a hidden world of dance battles to uncover the truth and reconnect with her passion for dance. This is the premise of To fire, debut in the long run of the Barcelona-born Estel Díaz, director of series such as Red flags (Atresplayer) and Missing (Netflix). Produced by Atresmedia Cine, Sábado Time and A Contracorriente Films, the film premieres this Friday after passing through the Atlantida Mallorca Film Fest. Díaz constructs it as thriller a frantic pace and eclectic choreographies. "There is a conception that young people get tired quickly when watching audiovisual content. And no. Young people do not get tired quickly if the content is of quality. You have to give them quality, and above all, the images that fill the screen must make sense," explains Díaz to ARA.

To experience what it's like inside a professional kitchen, chef Anthony Bourdain (1956-2018) wrote in 2000 Confessions of a Chef, about the obscure world behind the profession and the myths of haute cuisine. The book became a bestseller and was translated into more than thirty languages. For its 25th anniversary, Salamandra publishing house released a new version with a prologue by the Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting. Director Dani de la Orden recently read it and recommends it. “Until now, I hadn't been interested in the world of cooking, but I don't know if it was through series likeThe bear, or even Joc de cartes, this universe began to fascinate me,” explains De la Orden.

We have landed in Finland. During these days, we have visited with the family some of the works of Alvar Aalto (Kuortane, 1898 - Helsinki, 1976) which have just been declared World Heritage by Unesco. Thirteen buildings and complexes designed by Alvar, Aino and Elissa Aalto that explain a large part of the evolution of modern Finnish architecture. But after seeing them, entering them, and inhabiting them for a few hours, the feeling that remains has little to do with monumentality. Aalto's great victory is the victory of the human factor.

The X-Files popularized the narrative device of the monster of the week in the nineties. In the series, the protagonists faced all sorts of threats that were resolved in each episode. Although the concept had been around for a long time, it was later fictions such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Supernatural that, with self-awareness, developed it the most. The Insidious saga unashamedly embraces this formula through a diverse chronological narrative that gives rise to multiple stories with different protagonists, maintaining as a link the iconic character of the medium (Lin Shaye) and a danger that always arises from the world of the dead: an abyss of tortured souls trapped between our reality and the next. The protagonist of Insidious: The Red Door is a single mother with a traumatic childhood (trauma is a backbone element of the saga) who not only has the ability to travel to this other world, but is also the vehicle for the entities that inhabit it to be able to leave. As in any formula, and in a franchise where all films start from a similar pattern, this new chapter, written and directed by Jacob Chase (Come Play, 2020), is more than predictable in its plot twists. However, the filmmaker includes elements of interest: on the one hand, a certain political discourse that, although timidly and hidden in the horror of sects, addresses the fallacies of populism; on the other hand, the subtext of family inheritances, inherent in the Insidious films, is treated here from a story about women who raise children alone. The proposal maintains the playful and circus-like spirit of the horrors of the whole (the dental examination sequence, for example), but insists on a tone that is too psychological, as if it wanted to unevenly mirror the excellent fictions of Mike Flanagan.

Bruno de Fabriziis (Barcelona, 1993), artistically known as Mama Dousha, shies away from radio hits and presents his new artistic project Tothom té raó (Promo Arts Music, 2026), nine songs that, he says, engage anyone who listens to them. Nostalgia, love, social criticism, and the passage of time have allowed him to reconnect with the most romantic side of music, with an ambitious project produced by eight hands.

Between the work on stage and her vocation as a teacher, actress Mariona Castillo doesn't stop. This summer she wants to rest for a few days before starting rehearsals for the musical L'alegria que passa, Dagoll Dagom's latest musical, which will be performed in Shanghai in September. And in February next year, she will return with another revival, the musical Germans de sang. When recommending a book, Castillo's heart is divided between Marta Orriols' novel Aprendre a parlar amb les plantes(Edicions del Periscopi) and the graphic novel El cel al cap, by Antonio Altarriba, Sergio García and Lola Moral (Norma Editorial), which was one of the 10 best comics of 2023 by ARA.

The economist and essayist Tim Jackson (United Kingdom, 1957) calmly and meticulously explains the radical shift proposed by his latest book, The Case for a New Economy (Arcàdia, 2026, translated by Anna Llisterri). It deals, in the form of an initiatory journey – which includes personal anecdotes and philosophical, historical, and ecological lessons – with two ideas that clash with prevailing capitalism: the first, that human prosperity has more to do with health than wealth; the second, that the economy should above all be concerned with care, in all its forms, and not with incessant growth, as it currently is. Jackson, of whom Catalan readers had only previously been able to read Postgrowth (Arcàdia, 2022), opens the doors of his English study where he works to ARA to discuss the ideas that have preoccupied him over the last five years.

The Valencian band La Gossa Sorda is the headliner of the concerts on September 11th. The group, which is starring a return to the stage after ten years of absence, will perform as part of the Festa per la Llibertat (Freedom Festival) by Òmnium Cultural, on passeig Lluís Companys in Barcelona. The group will play at 9:30 PM, closing a musical program that will also feature DJ Trapella (7 PM) and DJ-KZU (11:45 PM). Throughout the day, cultural and advocacy activities will take place. Òmnium Cultural will hold its central political event for the Diada celebration at 12 PM. A new edition of MerCat will also be held, a fair of country proposals with dozens of companies, organizations, and activities.

The musician Delfín Amaya (Oviedo, 1954 - Barcelona, 2026) died on Sunday at the age of 74 in Barcelona, according to the Europa Press agency. Delfín Amaya formed the duo Los Amaya together with his brother José (A Coruña, 1952) in the 70s in Barcelona. Both of Romani ethnicity and relatives of the dancerCarmen Amaya, they became one of the main exponents of Catalan rumba thanks to a musical proposal that combined tradition with more contemporary sounds of the genre and fusion with pop melodies and electric guitars. The duo will always be remembered for songs like Vete and for having performed at the closing ceremony of the Barcelona Olympic Games.

Beatriz Bittencourt, known simply as Bia, is an editor born in São Paulo, the economic capital of Brazil and the most populous city in the Southern Hemisphere. Before coming to live in Catalonia, she worked for the most influential newspaper in the Latin American country, Folha de São Paulo. She also ran a bookstore and collaborated with Plana, an independent literature festival. With this background, she landed in Barcelona in 2018, driven by personal reasons. Upon arrival, she founded the publishing house No Libros, with the desire to integrate into Catalan society through a project based on the premise of creating other forms of knowledge circulation and production. Before fully discovering what she wanted to do, she admits that she edited varied works by different authors, in search of a common thread that would give meaning to the whole of her publications.

Actress Berta Giraut is one of the most multifaceted and restless figures on the Catalan scene, and one of the most literary. In addition to dedicating herself to acting, in 2020 she published the poetry collection "Com l'estel que no hi és" (El Gall Editor), and she has also directed, is the author of several theatrical texts, and works as a teacher of diction and oral expression. Her latest show as an actress is "L’última entrevista (Roig/Capmany)", in which she has stepped into the shoes of Montserrat Roig in an interview with Maria Aurèlia Capmany, who is played by Anna Güell. It was one of the successes of the past Grec festival and is scheduled to return in May 2027. "In all these works there is a lot of love for poetry, and lately I have investigated a lot about the dialogue between poetry and theater," explains Giraut. The book she recommends is a novel "very hard but very sincere and very authentic": "Génie la boja", by Inès Cagnati (Quid Pro Quo Edicions). "It is a very brief novel, it seems like a poem. It reaches your heart directly, and we lack things that truly touch our soul," says Giraut.

The Ukrainian Viktor Ishchuk (1983) says that practically all his memories, including childhood ones, are tied to classical dance. For years, Ishchuk was a soloist with the National Opera of Kyiv Ballet and, since 2011, has served as director of the Kyiv Ballet. "In 35 years, every day of my life has revolved around dance and, especially, Swan Lake. It is the most famous work in the world of classical ballet, and it is inexhaustible," says the choreographer and dancer from the foyer of the Tivoli Theatre. It is Monday, August 17th in the afternoon and the hall on Casp street has just reopened after the holiday break. Technicians and hall staff are preparing for the first show of the season, Swan Lake by the Kyiv Ballet, which will be shown from this Tuesday until August 30th.

The innocuous Spanish title of this tense Czech drama does not foretell its unsettling content. The original, Sbormistr, a single word meaning “the master of the choir,” offers more clues: the film is an empathetic portrayal of an entirely female community, that of the youth choir in the title, and a single man, this revered and feared master who is also a compulsive sexual predator.

The first aphorism that appears in The Wisdom of the Classics (Akiara Books), by Jordi Rincón and Núria Solsona, comes from a verse by the poet Horace: Incipere dimidium est, meaning, “to begin is half the way.” This is what this secondary school teacher thought when he was asked to write a book collecting some of the reflections he teaches in his Latin and Greek classes: thirty thoughts that, many centuries after being formulated, remain relevant.