The Catholic Church dominates the scene like no one else. It's fascinating how it has appropriated pagan festivals, linked to the natural cycle of life. In the case of the solstices, moments of maximum solar decline, with varying success. While the winter solstice—commemorated in the Roman Saturnalia with great feasts and gifts—has been displaced by the Christian Christmas, the summer solstice is one of the few soirees that has resisted it. Since ancient Persia, fire has been given ritual value and the earth is honored in gratitude for prosperity.

It's bad luck that the day of the Immaculate Conception was one of the windiest in the year. It is the ideal day for the illumination of the star that crowns the Sagrada Familia's tower of Mary. "Is that stuck on all right now? It won't fall off, will it?" asks an elderly man, a little frightened by the wind blowing in the immense square of Gaudí's temple. A few days ago a twelve-pointed star was attached at a height of one hundred and thirty-eight metres, putting the finishing touch on one of the towers of the eternally unfinished church. "Forty-nine years I've lived next door and from the first day this has seemed like a joke to me", exclaims Jeroni, who lives on Carrer de Mallorca. "How can it be that the building hasn't been finished yet? How can this be in my head?", he says as he pulls an incredulous, sardonic face. His friend Jaume reproaches him for his slander, his scepticism, as if he were an overly angry Barcelonian. I look at Wikipedia to check the dates. Construction began in 1882. One hundred and forty years seems a reasonable margin for an architectural project as pharaonic as this one.

Pope Francis surely upset a very important part of the Spanish ecclesiastical hierarchy with the naturalness with which he faced Carlos Herrera's questions on Cope about the Catalan independence bid. Far from the tearing of garments and the usual fussiness in the pronouncements of certain bishops, the pontiff took the heat off the issue the issue by recalling what is a historical truism, and that is that there are many precedents for the independence of countries in the recent European past, and he specifically cited the case of Kosovo, which Spain does not recognise precisely because it considers it a dangerous precedent for Catalonia or Euskadi. Francis, however, went beyond normalising and de-dramatising the debate on the independence of Catalonia, and put his finger on the sore point when he emphasised the concept of reconciliation: "National unity is fascinating, but it will never be achieved without the reconciliation of peoples", he said. In this sense, the Holy Father urged Spain to "reconcile itself with its own history".