When I returned to work from Girona four years ago, after years covering political information in Madrid, I set out to understand the cycling boom that the city has experienced. One of the first people I spoke to was Anna Gibert Sau (Riudarenes, 1977), a police officer specialized in sexist violence and co-founder of Girona Gravel Girls, a community made up exclusively of women that today already exceeds 430 members.

Ten days after leaving Girona's municipal government, Junts has made a significant announcement for the upcoming municipal elections in the city. Alongside Gemma Geis, who will repeat as the head of the list, Carles Puigdemont's party has confirmed the incorporation of Carles Ribas as number two. A former member of Convergència and a councilor during Marta Madrenas's term, Ribas ran four years ago with his own brand, ARA Girona, but narrowly missed entering City Hall after obtaining 1,579 votes (4.6%). These were insufficient to surpass the 5% threshold to obtain a councilor but were key to understanding that Junts lost half of its votes in the last municipal elections. Ribas is currently part of the Partit Nacionalista de Catalunya (PNC), founded by Marta Pascual, and will run in the city in coalition with Junts x Girona.

Disney has landed in Girona with a team of 500 people to shoot the live-action version – in English, live action– from the film Tangled, his adaptation of the Rapunzel tale. It is a remake with real action from the original animated film, which will be shot this July in the city and is expected to premiere from 2027.

After Franco's death, social movements moved intensely to the streets. During the first semester of 1976, in Girona, unauthorized strikes and demonstrations were seen, which led to detentions and fines by the governmental authority. Those that, during the month of March, were led by construction workers, and the so-called March of Freedom, organized peacefully in the first week of July to claim basic freedoms and the Statute of Autonomy, were especially repressed.

A bag of salad, some cookies, cat food, or the plastic label from a water bottle. It's hard to find a supermarket without some kind of flexible packaging. They are present, on average, in half of the products, even up to 80%. But behind these wrappers lies an industry practically invisible to the consumer, yet essential for products to be promoted on shelves. From Riudellots de la Selva, in the urban area of Girona, Comexi has been developing the technology for over seventy years that allows for the printing and transformation of this type of packaging, a global market where it competes with some of the world's leading manufacturers.

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.

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.

He assures that he felt no pain while receiving violent baton blows all over his body, nor when the Civil Guard agents threw him to the ground and dragged him a few meters, nor when they deliberately stepped on him with their boots, nor when, with no strength to get up, he turned pale and suffocated. Josep Maria Nadal, former rector of the University of Girona, professor and catedrático of Catalan philology, explains that he felt the pain just as the Civil Guards were leaving the polling station in Aiguaviva shouting ¡Viva España! ” He still has marks on his body from October 1st, but it is not the physical pain he suffered that hurts him the most, but the moral damage caused by the voices that deny or justify the brutal police charges of that day, such as that of the writer Javier Cercas, former professor at the UdG.

The dampness that seeped through the walls and the darkness that filled the narrow corridors and rooms of the air-raid shelter in the Jardins de la Infància in Girona were forever etched into the memory of the citizens who hid there when planes flew over and bombed the city during the Civil War. On days of inclement heat waves, visiting this basement, reconverted into a Democratic Memory Space of the Girona History Museum, allows one to learn how the people of Girona protected themselves against aerial attacks and, at the same time, enjoy the much-desired climatic comfort on days of suffocating temperatures.

Julia Aceituno first set foot in Girona in 1990. She had grown up in Talanga, a small town of 40,000 inhabitants an hour from the capital of Honduras, Tegucigalpa, and at the time she was 36 years old and had three children. "I came for a holiday during the time of Felipe González," she recalls. At that time in Girona there were only nine of her compatriots: "We all knew each other!". Thirty-six years later, in the urban area of Girona alone, it is estimated that there are about 20,000 people of Honduran origin, and in the entire province, 40,000.

For the second consecutive year, and with the aim of it becoming a tradition, Girona kicks off the summer with a habaneras singing session overlooking the cathedral and Sant Fèlix. While on the Costa Brava the event is marked by the first Saturday of July in Calella de Palafrugell, in the capital of Girona it is brought forward to Thursday. The evening, organized by the cultural foundation El Foment, also includes a wide gastronomic offering of Catalan products and seeks to re-signify the Plaça Catalunya space.

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.

Between Girona and Salt, in a half-finished farmhouse, about twenty African boys, originally from countries like Gambia, Senegal, Mauritania, and Mali, are living in hardship. The house has no electricity or water. It also lacks doors and windows in the openings, and inside, there is only the structure of the main walls. The young men have improvised compartments with cardboard and fabrics where they sleep on mattresses, blankets, and camping tents. In the middle of the building, there is a staircase without walls or a railing, with a very dangerous fall into the void, especially at night. They cook in a room with a wood fire on the ground or with gas stoves, shower with jugs from the well, and have no toilets.

In a labor market that has radically changed in the last three decades, there are companies that have not only known how to adapt, but also to anticipate and grow alongside businesses and people. This is the case of Marlex, which in 2026 celebrates its 30th anniversary as one of the major references for talent and human resources in Spain. What began in 1996 as an entrepreneurial project born in Girona is today a group with more than 500 professionals, more than 80 offices, and a turnover of 180 million euros. But, beyond the figures, the Marlex story is that of a company built on proximity, trust, and a firm conviction: that people are the true engine of economic and business growth. Founded by Jaume Sanabras, Marlex was born with the intention of responding to the real needs of the local business fabric, at a time when the labor market was beginning to transform profoundly. That vision initially materialized into two complementary companies: Marlex People, specialized in temporary work, and Eurogrup Consulting, focused on the selection of qualified profiles.

After the boom of Game of Thrones a decade ago, Girona is once again becoming the setting for a major international series. This weekend, the city center hosts the filming of the first season of Tomb Raider, by Amazon MGM Studios, with actress Sophie Turner as the protagonist. It is the live-action adaptation of the famous video game franchise starring the adventurous archaeologist Lara Croft, which had already reached the big screen at the hands of Angelina Jolie and Alicia Vikander. Now it does so in series format and will premiere next year. In addition to Turner, the cast features prominent names such as Sigourney Weaver and Jason Isaacs, and the production is by Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag) as creator, screenwriter, and executive producer. 

A Catalan clarinettist and a Syrian oud player creating music together. This is the story of Oriol Marès and Talal Fayad, two young musicians who blur the lines between genres and cultures, moving between influences from jazz improvisation, Latin rhythms, and Middle Eastern resonances. With their quartet, in 2025 they released their first album, Estuarium, and are already working on their second, titled Uncivilized, which they will present in October at the Fira Mediterrània in Manresa, after touring China and South Korea.

Although she hasn't lost hope of becoming a "skater, pianist, dancer, and screenwriter for Larry David," Marta Pasqual (Girona, 1983) combines teaching in secondary school, where she teaches French literature, with writing novels as interesting as L'àngel que em mira (Empúries, 2026), the third she has published since debuting in fiction with El malaventurat senyor Clauss (Empúries, 2022). After winning the Just M. Casero prize with La casa dels caps de setmana (Empúries, 2023), Pasqual presents a story centered on a 60-year-old family man, Isaac, who suffers a domestic accident that leaves him in a coma. This starting point allows the author to combine the account of this decisive moment in the protagonist's life with the flood of memories, both good and painful, that visit him during his convalescence.

The Mossos d'Esquadra entered forcefully this Tuesday early in the morning in one of the most complex neighborhoods in Catalonia. Up to 600 agents of the Catalan police were summoned at five in the morning to launch a major operation against drug trafficking of marijuana in the Font de la Pólvora neighborhood of Girona, as well as in other towns, such as Riudarenes, Cassà de la Selva, l'Escala, Sils, Caldes de Malavella, Brunyola, Llagostera, Bescanó, Celrà, Quart and Salt.

60% of Girona's residents use Catalan as their usual language in social relationships, alone or combined with Spanish. If we look at the priority use of Catalan in Girona, the figure drops to 48%, still above the national average, which is 42% of usual Catalan use including bilingual uses. If we look at exclusive uses, the gap remains: in Girona, only 39% of the population habitually speaks Catalan, and the Catalan average is 33%.

Today we will have new revelations about the judicial investigation into the lobbying activity of former Spanish president Zapatero, because the judge will deliver to the parties everything that is in the initiated summary. And, of course, with new revelations the pressure on Sánchez's government to step down will increase. On this front there is a significant novelty: the PNB, through its president, Aitor Esteban, said yesterday that it would be “irresponsible” for Sanchez to want to exhaust the legislature in 2027, that is to say, that in view of everything that has emerged (the Zapatero case, but also the Cerdán and Ábalos cases) it would be imprudent to want to go beyond this year.What Esteban is telling Sánchez is that he should not abuse his patience and the deadlock in which the parties that voted for the socialist president's investiture find themselves: it is unlikely that the PNB, Junts, and not to mention the so-called "plurinational lefts" will vote for Feijóo as president of the government with Vox in a motion of censure, but if corruption continues to tarnish Sánchez, it is the Spanish president who should be obliged to call early elections. After all, Sánchez came to power with a motion of censure after corruption drowned Rajoy and the PP government.As always happens in these cases, now there are voices demanding that the law better define the limits between lobbying and falling into the crime of influence peddling. And the convenience of rescuing the airline Plus Ultra during the pandemic is also reviewed in hindsight, because it was not essential for air traffic between Spain and Latin America. If it wasn't, why did they rescue it? The PSOE is crossing its fingers so that the judge hasn't found anything else and can recover the discourse of "lawfare" (a possibility that, given what we have seen in the Spanish justice system, would not be so dismissible), but everyone you talk to tells you that, at the very least, Zapatero acted very much on the edge.While the socialists are crossing their fingers that nothing else comes up, in our country, tomorrow there will be another meeting between the Government and the education unions. The teachers' strikes are more than a stone in the government's shoe, they are a boulder in the road that doesn't let it continue to move with confidence and optimism after having been able to present a budget that will be approved. We are at the end of the sports seasons, and Catalonia has lost a team in the First Football Division, Girona. After having reached the Champions League, it drops to the Second Division: the team could not withstand the departure of key players who had made a name for themselves. Not all news is bad. Two Catalans succeeding in the world: the Barça women's football team, which tonight was received in Barcelona by 10,000 people after having won the Champions League, the fourth in the Club's history, in a perfect season that includes all three Spanish titles. And wait, because Alexia Putellas, after Saturday's Champions League, could very well win the Ballon d'Or again. For the visibility of professional women's sport, the service Barça is providing is extraordinary. And Pep Guardiola, who yesterday was bid farewell at City's stadium after 10 years as its manager. The mark Guardiola has left on football can only be defined by "a before and an after"; this can be said of very few managers in history. By the way, both celebrations, that of the Barça players and that of the Santpedor coach, were united by the estelada: