If Lent comes early, Palm Sunday will also come early. As soon as tomorrow. And if Palm Sunday comes so early, it means that, in fact, we are already in Holy Week. Well, now all this is hardly noticed. Yes, we still go to bless four laurel branches and someone still carries a long and straight palm branch, but, of the whole week, only Good Friday is a holiday. Saturday, which was previously called Glory and is now called Saint, is always a holiday, and Easter Monday, which people mistakenly call the “dia de la mona” (the day of the Easter cake), joins Friday and they make a festive long weekend that people take advantage of to travel, ski and, the most daring, undress and sunbathe on the beach. Before, when I was young, all of Holy Week was a holiday, more or less. Especially from Thursday onwards.

This Wednesday, February 18th, the calendar marks an unusual coincidence: the simultaneous start of Catholic Lent and Muslim Ramadan. This exceptional occurrence is solely due to a matter of calendar calculation. Lent depends on the Christian liturgical calendar and the variable date of Easter—which is always celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox, making it fall between approximately March 23rd and April 25th—while Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar, based on the solar calendar, which is about ten to twelve days long each year, making it movable from year to year. Because they follow different calendars and progress at different rates, Lent and Ramadan only sporadically coincide in the Gregorian calendar, as they do in 2026. This simultaneity invites us to ask how these two central periods for the two major religions are similar and how they differ.

This March 5th marks one of the most important dates in the liturgical calendar: Ash Wednesday. After a week of partying and debauchery to celebrate Carnival, the festivities end, and during this day the burial of the sardine takes place. It is also the first day of Lent, the 40-day period preceding Holy Week. But what exactly do we celebrate on Ash Wednesday and why is it called that?

Xavier Barriga, baker and creator of Turris, He is a proponent of traditional pastry recipes., such as fritters Lentwhich is one of the eagerly awaited fried desserts on the Catalan sweet calendar.