The philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) said that joy is not a fleeting state of mind but an emotion that comes from knowledge and reason, and that it becomes a political and ethical tool to transform society. Four centuries have passed and the world does not offer many reasons for joy, between the climate crisis and the rise of hate speech, but Francisco Javier Vera is determined, he says, to "resume the philosophy of the Dutchman Baruch Spinoza" and use joy to change the world. "It is not about denying reality, but about assuming it to try to imagine possible alternative futures not from anger or uncertainty but from joy," he argues.

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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Exactly 90 years ago, the poet Federico García Lorca was shot on the outskirts of Granada, in a place between the municipalities of Alfacar and Víznar that no one has yet been able to confirm with exactitude. His disappearance is not an exception: it is the best-known symbol of a phenomenon that remains open throughout the State and that, right now, is experiencing a silent setback where the PP and Vox share government. Just as the anniversary of Lorca's death is being commemorated, the Junta de Andalucía – the autonomous community where the poet was from and which has the most mass graves in the entire State, with more than 3,000 people buried in the Víznar ravine alone – has set an expiration date for the law that protects the search for the disappeared of Francoism.

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The summer of 1936, Federico García Lorca (Granada, June 5, 1898 - between Víznar and Alfacar, Granada, August 18 or 19, 1936) decided to leave Madrid and go to Granada for a short stay. The assassination of the Minister of Finance during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, Calvo Sotelo, on July 13, had left him very uneasy. "July 18 was his saint's day and his father's, and they were going to celebrate it, and also to say goodbye to the family because he was leaving for Mexico with the actress Margarida Xirgu. His intention was to return to Madrid in the autumn, because he was to premiere La casa de Bernarda Alba and publish Poeta en Nueva York", explains journalist and writer Víctor Fernández.

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"Lorca is a universal symbol and is alive in the memory of all of us, his work can be found in any library, but of the rest of thousands of murders in Granada there is hardly any information and they must be rescued from oblivion. There is a memory that could not leave the houses for fear of the Civil Guard, the police and the neighbors themselves," points out the archaeologist Francisco Carrión, who has led many of the excavations, including that of the Barranc de Víznar, in Granada.

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It is a wish. May she never forget, please, the photo Esra took of me, who will sleep tonight at a gas station on the E-75 in northern Greece. Nor the kiss so sweet - a sigh on my ear - that Mahmud gave me while his father, younger than me although he doesn't look it, smiled at me. May she never forget the boy who preferred to play football with me more than with the little ones because I kick better.

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This Sunday, the World Architecture Congress begins in Barcelona, which will bring together architects and students from all over the world in the city to debate the future of the discipline.

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Taking advantage of the fact that these are days of gastronomic indulgence, in Sunday's dossier we want to focus on our general overconsumption of ultra-processed foods, a temptation that is easy to succumb to, but which has consequences. Scientific evidence links the consumption of these products to diseases with a higher risk of premature death. And in the last year, studies have increased, as have calls from scientists to put a stop to this. We'll look at what happens to our bodies when we eat, what the experts say, what alternatives exist, and what the differences are between prepared, processed, and ultra-processed foods.

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On the eve of the Extremadura elections, ARA spent three days exploring a "forgotten" region that is now in the spotlight as it kicks off the new electoral cycle. All polls predict that the PSOE, the party that has historically dominated Extremadura, will lose its top spot to the PP for the second time in 40 years, with Vox on the rise. In addition to explaining the candidates' profiles and providing the latest information, we analyze the socioeconomic characteristics of a region marked by depopulation and the export of raw materials.

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Europeans are "weak" and "decadent," and the European Union is a mistake that should be dissolved, according to US President Donald Trump. Relations between the US and Europe have never been so strained, and perhaps for the first time, some voices within the EU are beginning to dare to protest, demand respect, and propose a "divorce" between the former allies. This Sunday, we dedicate this dossier to explaining this clash, its background, its consequences, and exploring what Europe can do to break out of this impasse.

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Just as we have previously focused on changes within the Catholic Church or on crises of faith among young people, this Sunday we turn our attention to one of the religions with the most followers in Catalonia: Islam. It's not easy, because although there are 319 mosques in Catalonia, it's unknown how many imams there are, what countries they come from, or what their ideology is. The same is true in other European countries, but many governments have begun to take steps to better understand the situation in order to prevent radicalization and, above all, to facilitate a better understanding of the country's social and cultural reality. Journalist Mònica Bernabé has spent months investigating who the imams of Catalonia are and has spoken with countless experts. The conclusion is that Catalonia lags behind the rest of Europe in this regard.

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Now that we're entering one of the peak shopping seasons of the year, it's a good time to shed light on what happens to all the clothes we don't use. This Sunday, in the special report, you'll find the results of a Europe-wide investigation, in which an ARA contributor participated, tracing the surprising and often opaque routes of the clothes we discard. Using markers sewn onto various garments, a team of journalists reconstructed the journeys to major logistics hubs in countries like the United Arab Emirates and calculated the carbon footprint generated by this global system.

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One of the most significant transformations of recent years has been China's consolidation as a major global power. In this report, we examine what has changed within the country and, like many tourists who visit, we wonder what has led to such technological advancement. ARA's correspondent in Beijing, Dolors Rodríguez, explains the extent to which society, from the homeless to business leaders, is now fully digitized and how this technological progress shapes daily life.

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Next week marks the 50th anniversary of the death of dictator Francisco Franco. Older generations vividly remember the atrocities of the regime and the rollback of freedoms, human rights, and social injustices caused by the coup against the Republic. However, his figure is being championed not only by nostalgics but also by far-right groups and, increasingly, by a segment of young conservatives who have made it a trending topic. This Sunday's report delves into this phenomenon and the price paid when the past is not held accountable.

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There have been warning signs for some time about a potential AI bubble that could burst at any moment. For now, the stock prices of the companies involved are holding steady. The context is the race to lead in AI, which the United States fears will be won by China, a country that readily subsidizes companies and data centers that demand such vast amounts of energy and water that they are already causing environmental problems in many countries. In this report, we explain what is happening and what is real about this risk of a bubble.

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Wars continue to cause destruction and death, but battlefield strategy must change because new elements are completely transforming how we attack and defend. The clearest example is drones, which have revolutionized warfare in Ukraine and other conflicts. Therefore, this weekend we're focusing on drones in the military and defense sectors, explaining what they are, how they work, and how they have changed warfare.

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This week marks one year since the flood that left 229 dead in the Valencian Community. The evident mismanagement of that massive flood has not led to any political consequences. Mazón's continued leadership of the Valencian Government keeps the wound open and leaves the families of the victims unable to grieve. David Miró writes an analytical report on the political and social situation there. We also look at the people who have not had access to aid and observe the current state of reconstruction.

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Ageism, the discrimination against someone simply because they are older or younger, is a real problem. That's why we're dedicating this weekend's dossier to it. We explain what it is and how it affects us, with witnesses who have experienced or continue to experience this discrimination and experts who analyze it. We also offer a glossary of terms specific to this phenomenon and testimony from a surprising case that ended up in court.

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