They say that the eight-hour coach journey from Madrid to Olot was a joy compared to the hellish journey they had to make from Herat, the Afghan city where they are from, to Kabul to catch a Spanish evacuation flight. "Here the roads are real roads, there are public toilets and the bus stopped every two hours", she says with a look of astonishment on her face. In Afghanistan the trip lasted 24 hours, the road was mostly dirt and the bus stopped on only one occasion.

In the Kabul Museum there are 80,000 pieces of art, many of which are of incalculable value. In fact, it has only been a few years since the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago had managed to compile the first complete digital inventory of all the pieces. Now all this wealth and heritage is in the hands of the Taliban. The radicals have occupied the museum building and will not let anyone in. Noor Agha Noori, director of the Afghanistan Institute of Archaeology, said by telephone from Kabul that he could not believe that all the work done over the past two decades could be wiped out in just a few days.

Maybe here, in the West, his name doesn't ring a bell, but Ahmad Naser Sarmast - or Doctor Sarmast, as everyone knows him in Afghanistan - is a true eminence. The son of a well-known Afghan composer, he grew up listening to music and music has always been his life. In the 1990s he went into exile in Australia because of the war and could have stayed there peacefully, but in 2008 he returned to Afghanistan to revive music after the fall of the Taliban regime. Two years later he founded the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, from where he has worked miracles.