1. I take the R11 to travel from Barcelona to Girona. I go by train if I don't need to be on time. I must admit that trains are quite regular; however, only in their delays and the incidents they suffer. When it's not a sinkhole, it's a copper theft; if it's not a strike, it's an accident. The people waiting with me on the platform (regular users) no longer complain. They've thrown in the towel. We are gradually but steadily becoming a resigned people.We stoically accept the waiting lists to see a specialist. If we can afford it, we pay for private insurance, but even in the private sector, the healthcare pressure is intense. If we need to deal with the administration – renew our ID card, regularize our residency, get our passport, or process a pension – making an appointment is a nightmare. But what can we do! That's just how things are!2. The entrance to Barcelona between 7 and 9 in the morning is terrifying, but we Catalans are not afraid of anything. The regulars, impassive behind the wheel, no longer lose their nerves: they civilly endure the queues. Resignation. Better to keep calm, as an inappropriate maneuver will end in a fine. When you receive it, if you want to pay it through your online bank, you will have to copy some tiny numbers, packed under a barcode, which can only be read with a 20x magnifying glass. Resignation.3. At Girona station, the train stop is on a viaduct built over houses and streets, with a concrete canopy that supposedly protects you from the weather. Whoever designed it covered themselves in glory. Now, in summer, it does provide shade, yes, but... always outside the platform. It's impossible to get out of the way of the scorching rays of a red-hot, wild sun.At Passeig de Gràcia station things are no better. Instead of benches or chairs, there is a structure of two aluminum tubes attached horizontally to the wall to lean on: they are designed in such a way that whoever uses them is neither sitting nor standing. After a few minutes, your whole body hurts.4. The greatness of a country is also measured by the love put into creating public facilities and services. The first condition, of course, is that they satisfy the function for which they were created: canopies should provide shade, you should be able to sit on chairs, numerical codes should be readable. But the second is that they are pleasant, that they don't put you off. That they are well designed and well maintained. This is called management.Things go wrong. They age. They wear out and break down. Effective policy, the kind that aims to improve people's lives, has a first commandment that should be engraved on a plaque on the walls of all ministries and governments: first and foremost, do not make things worse. Management, management, management. To know how long a service has been failing, just look at the user's level of resignation. 5. I'm going to Girona for lunch with a good friend. Catalonia has plenty of restaurants to choose from; some, ranked among the best in the world, are in Girona. In many of these establishments, you can't choose what you eat, and increasingly less so – the servitude of pairings – what you drink. The justification: what you experience on these occasions is a unique experience.These days you can see The Odyssey in cinemas. I read that the director shot it thinking about a projection system only available in 41 theaters worldwide. None of them in Catalonia. The logic of this cinema is the same as that of contemporary haute cuisine, or of so many other things: skydiving, investing in cryptocurrencies or hypnotizing yourself with reels.6. It is the logic of a supposed instant, intense, and unrepeatable gratification. That of crystallized yuzu ravioli with melanosporum emulsion. That of sensory explosions, bombastic declarations, effortless gain, adrenaline rushes, or the great collective operations that promise to redeem an entire country.Faced with this logic of the unique instant, I want to reclaim the value of repeated experience. The logic of the stew, we could say. The sediment of ordinary and good things; ways of doing and being, objects, equipment, or recipes that, like proverbs, represent the most valuable precipitate of a culture, a tradition, and a country's identity. Lovingly maintaining, with respect and admiration, the cooking of one's mother or father is not so far from maintaining, with the same love, respect, and responsibility, the services that hold a country together.

The Chamber of Contractors of Public Works of Catalonia notes a "loss of dynamism" in public contracting which, as they assure, "keeps the tendered volume far from the levels that would be necessary to reduce the accumulated deficit in infrastructure investment". In its quarterly report on tenders in Catalonia, the entity points to a "stalemate": between January and June, 1,714.1 million euros have been tendered, which represents an increase of 2.1% compared to the same period in 2025.

On June 25, the latest issue of the Revista Econòmica de Catalunya (Catalan Economic Review), commemorating its 40th anniversary, was presented at the Parliament of Catalonia. The contributions review the last 40 years of the different aspects that make up Catalan economy and society. With these contributions, along with Miquel Àngel Garcia López (UAB & IEB), we review the evolution that Catalan cities have experienced.

President Salvador Illa has placed the "water independence" of the Barcelona metropolitan area at 33%, and recalled that the objective is to reach 70% by 2030. The head of the Catalan Government made this declaration at the inauguration of the Estrella Drinking Water Treatment Plant (ETAP) in Sant Feliu de Llobregat, built by the French multinational Veolia and operated by Aigües de Barcelona, of which it owns 70% of the capital. This facility can treat 1,000 liters of water per second and represented an investment of 47 million.

Many things are not working well in our society: lack of housing, congestion in health services, schools with unsatisfactory and unimproving PISA test results, infrastructure with lack of investment and maintenance such as Rodalies or the AP-7, lack of investment in renewable energies in Catalonia along with a major blackout in the Peninsula (the causes of which we still do not know), security incidents such as systematic copper thefts, repeat offenders, marijuana plantations to win the European league, and an increase in shootings with some murders in broad daylight.

The Government took an essential step this Tuesday to advance the planned investments in mobility infrastructure for the next decade. The President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, announced that the executive has given the green light to the new investment plan that should allow it to allocate more than 4,300 million euros from now until 2036 to update a network that suffers from the investment deficit of the last decade. To achieve this goal, the Government has approved the update and expansion of the Program for Commissioning of Actions (PEA), a document without which works cannot be put out to tender. "We are making a quantitative and qualitative leap," said the President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, this Tuesday during the closing of a congress organized by Forbes in Barcelona.

The President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, tried to win over Catalan businesspeople during his intervention at the Cercle d'Economia announcing investments in "strategic infrastructures" through a public-private collaboration system to accelerate the construction of infrastructures with investments of up to 3.3 billion euros. This Tuesday, the executive council of the Generalitat "analyzed the projects" and the spokesperson for the Generalitat, Sílvia Paneque, assured at the press conference following the meeting that the Government's intention is for the works to begin in the autumn-winter of next year and for them to be available in about "six years".

Some people will be surprised to hear a pharmacy organization talking about productivity, competitiveness, dimensions, and business viability. But it is precisely now when we must do so with more clarity than ever. We live in times of upheaval and uncertainty in supply chains and, not least, at the start of the conflict in the Middle East, the European Medicines Agency warned that persistent logistical difficulties could cause shortages of ingredients, medicines, or healthcare products.Community pharmacy is part of one of the densest and most accessible proximity pharmaceutical health models in Europe. In Catalonia and Spain, the vast majority of the population (98.8%) has a pharmacy within a few minutes of their home. This capillarity is no coincidence: it is the result of a model that combines an assistance vocation, territorial roots, and sustained business effort over decades. Behind each pharmacy office is – in addition to a health establishment – a micro-enterprise, a self-employed person, a human team, and a structure that generates employment, assumes on-call duties, maintains proximity services, and guarantees health accessibility every day of the year.

"Oh, it's difficult to say when the works will begin. It's a complex, very important and strategic line for the country. The urban planning part has been done since 2010 and now we will have to start with studies and projects. It won't be tomorrow; these infrastructures cost". These are statements by the Minister of Economy, Alícia Romero, to Catalunya Ràdio about the macro-project that has been decisive to unblock the approval of the budgets: the orbital railway line. ERC wants to reactivate a plan that has been in a drawer for twenty years to give its "yes" to the accounts. In fact, the Republicans present it as a future bet for a network that this year has experienced an unprecedented crisis and is still trying to recover some semblance of normality.

One of the most important things that Foment del Treball does every year is to calculate the infrastructure deficit that Catalonia suffers from in order to denounce underfunding that particularly penalizes the competitiveness of the Catalan economy. The figure is obtained in a very simple way. The minimum investment that would correspond to Catalonia is calculated based on a percentage of GDP, which they set at 2.2%, and it is compared with the real figure, which is always lower. And if a sufficiently long period of time is taken, for example from 2009 to the present day, the resulting figure is scandalous, close to 50 billion euros. And if we add the cost of living, the figure climbs to 60 billion.

A study by Foment del Treball estimates the investment deficit in Catalan infrastructures at 49,543 million euros between 2009 and 2025. "It is alarming, profoundly indignant, and absolutely intolerable," stated the president of the entity, Josep Sánchez Llibre, this Monday during the presentation of the report. And the trend is not reversing: according to the president of the employers' association, the situation has been aggravated by a "disastrous" public management that "is not corrected, but rather becomes more serious each time."

A study by Foment del Treball estimates the investment deficit in Catalan infrastructure at 49,543 million euros between 2009 and 2025. "It is alarming, profoundly outrageous, and absolutely intolerable," stated the entity's president, Josep Sánchez Llibre, this Monday during the report's presentation. And the trend is not reversing: according to the employers' association president, the situation has been aggravated by “a disastrous” public management that “is not being corrected, but is becoming more serious each day.” The data arises from the difference between observed tenders and a threshold of 2.2% of Catalan gross domestic product (GDP), which according to the study should serve as a reference.

The state of infrastructure health in Spain requires urgent intervention. Seopan, the employers' association representing large construction and concession companies, has estimated the investment needed for the conservation and maintenance of the road, rail, and water networks over the next decade at 127,341 million euros. This figure is just the tip of the iceberg: if we add new projects and climate adaptation, the total needs rise to 407,341 million euros.

The Barcelona Chamber of Commerce has warned this Monday that a significant portion of the water infrastructure investments planned in response to the drought episode that affected Catalonia between 2021 and 2024 are delayed or, in some cases, stalled, including the Tordera and Foix desalination plants. Likewise, the business organization has warned that European regulations require administrations to invest more in water purification and regeneration, which may necessitate future increases in investments in this area.

Surveys are often published asking the population, or specific groups, what issues concern them most. Rarely are the results surprising. This lack of surprise is basically due to two principles: media intensity and proximity. The media intensity principle states that the more coverage an issue receives in the media, the more relevant we perceive it to be. The proximity principle, for its part, operates when the problem directly affects our daily lives or those of someone close to us.

Catalan economists are currently more concerned about infrastructure than fiscal deficit, according to the winter 2026 Economic Situation Survey by the College of Economists of Catalonia. Problems in the functioning of Rodalies, the derailment that occurred on line R-1 at the beginning of the year, and the fatal accident on R-4 have led to a 13-point increase in the proportion of professionals who warn of the situation and consider it a priority issue to address. This is the opinion of 45.1% of respondents, above the 44.6% for the fiscal deficit with the State, which until now was the main concern of this professional group and has now moved to second place.

Infrastructure is a national issue. And it should be treated as such. The Chamber of Commerce, together with the council that brings together the 13 existing chambers of commerce in Catalonia, has launched an observatory to monitor public investment. It will not only point out what hasn't been done but also propose what should be done, both in the immediate future and in the longer term. The most urgent projects, up to 2030, total €14.5 billion and cover priorities such as rail, airports, water, and roads. But it doesn't stop there; it also projects to 2043, at which point the necessary investments reach €53.8 billion.

€53.8 billion by 2043 to prevent the collapse of infrastructure in Catalonia. This is the calculation made by the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce through its new Infrastructure Observatory, which produced the study. Strategic projects for Cataloniawhich affects airports, railways, roads, ports, logistics, and water transition. "Current investment must be doubled," summarized the Chamber's vice president, Miquel Martí. Without addressing the investment deficit, "the system will collapse," he said. The Chamber representative called for a national agreement on the matter, led by the Catalan government. The president of the Chamber and of the Council of Chambers of Commerce of Catalonia, Josep Santacreu, stated that the necessary effort cannot be undertaken "without a united effort," such as "a major national agreement on infrastructure," and called for "local management" of these projects.

On Tuesday, the Catalan government dusted off one of the long-standing projects that has been stalled for years. The Consell Executiu (the Catalan government's executive body) gave a boost to the Eix Transversal Ferroviari de Catalunya (Cross-Sector Railway of Catalonia), the major railway project for inland Catalonia that aims to connect Lleida and Girona without passing through Barcelona, ​​a project that had been shelved for over fifteen years. Now, the government has tasked Infraestructuras Ferroviarias de Catalunya (Ifercat) with updating the technical studies that were carried out at the time, with the goal of reactivating the project.

California has been planning a high-speed rail line for years, but construction is progressing very slowly and only a few sections have been completed; Spain, however, has one of the most extensive high-speed rail networks in the world and continues to open new sections. Excessive regulation, institutional obstacles, and the way politicians respond to local interests explain why so much is being built in Spain and so little in the United States.