Popular football is booming in Barcelona. For some time now, young people in the capital have been flocking to their neighborhood clubs, which have become part of their social fabric on a daily basis. This is evident in Vila de Gràcia (Europa), Sant Andreu de Palomar (UE Sant Andreu), or la Verneda i la Pau (Júpiter). In Sants, where another historic team like Unió Esportiva Sants plays, this phenomenon is not reproduced. In fact, the club is becoming increasingly distant emotionally and geographically from the neighborhood and its fans, and this is explained by the fact that it has not had a home for decades, a stadium it can call its own. “We are a neighborhood club that doesn't play in its neighborhood. The team was born and grew around the historic core of Sants, but we have been competing far from there for many years,” says Artur Balaux, a lifelong Sants fan and curator of the club's historical memory. Currently, the first team plays its home games at Camp de la Bàscula, and the youth teams are spread across this same ground, l’Energia, and l’Ibèria. All of them are located in the Marina de Port neighborhood, next to the Zona Franca.“Many times people ask me: ‘Why doesn’t Sants play in Sants?’ And I answer: ‘Because we don’t have a field.’ We are exiled from our home and increasingly uprooted from the neighborhood,” comments Joan Forcadell, the club’s president. “The chain of transmission from parents to children and from grandparents to grandchildren has been broken, and of course, we have lost a lot of fans,” confirms Balaux, who is member number 18. The social decline has been accompanied by high rental costs – the lease of the three fields accounts for about 25% of the club’s annual budget – and this has been reflected on the pitch: the first team went from Tercera RFEF to Primera Catalana, two categories below, in two years, and currently occupies a relegation spot to Segunda Catalana. In 2023, Sants was a rival of Europa and Sant Andreu; as things stand, everything suggests that next season it will be five divisions lower.”

This week the new Cercanías Cataluña commuter rail line has started operating. This joint venture between Renfe (State) and the Generalitat This marks a turning point in the transfer of the Cercanías commuter rail network and represents a complete overhaul of railway management, which will now be based in Catalonia. However, the Minister of Territory – and now also president of the new company – Sílvia Paneque, has already made it clear that "the changes will not be immediate," but that improvements should begin to be noticeable as the new Cercanías team assumes its responsibilities. Among the more than one hundred projects underway, these are the main challenges that the network (and the new company) must address in 2026:

The red King Kong sculpture that used to climb onto the ledge of an apartment building in the Sants neighborhood is now lying in a corner. The owner has decided to remove it after a new fine from Barcelona City Council, another step in a nine-year path of municipal sanctions.

The chest-thumping red King Kong perched on the ledge of an apartment building next to Sants station has been in the sights of Barcelona's urban planning authorities since 2016, when the property's owner bought it and placed it at the top of the facade. It is a piece by French sculptor Richard Orlinski, who has adapted his version of the work. Wild Kong In different colors and sizes, in resin and metal, he has exhibited his enormous figures all over the world. In Barcelona, however, he has run into municipal sanctions, and after nine years, the owner of the Cosmo Apartments has opted to cover up the gorilla, hoping to win the legal battle with the City Council.

Among the many commuters who were unable to take the AVE (High Speed Train) from Barcelona to Madrid yesterday—a thousand of whom remain stranded in the Catalan capital, according to the Catalan government—was a familiar face, actor Viggo Mortensen. This morning, after sleeping at a friend's house, he returned to Sants station hoping to travel to the Spanish capital. He did so wearing a sweatshirt with the Ukrainian coat of arms and carrying the ARA newspaper under his arm.

The power returned (partially) while it was still daylight, and people applauded and excitedly photographed streetlights. At dusk, Barcelona became a mixture of darkness and light. Some streets were illuminated; in others, nothing could be seen beyond a few balconies with their bulbs on and cell phone flashlights on for orientation. Why has electricity been restored to the homes and not the streets? It's a question municipal sources haven't been able to answer. As the hours passed and dawn arrived, the center of Barcelona returned to what it was, with an artificial light (almost without dark spots) that revealed drunken tourists zigzagging with bottles in their hands, cleaning crews, and police officers (today twice as many as on other nights) patrolling.

El Celler de Gelida turns 130, and it's celebrating this afternoon with a solemn ceremony at the headquarters of the Sants-Montjuïc district (Creu Coberta, 104) in Barcelona, ​​​​which will be attended by the city's mayor, Jaume Collboni. Toni Falgueras happily tells me this as soon as I walk in, and I've asked him to show me the jewel in the crown of the Celler de Gelida in Barcelona (Vallespir, 65), a jewel that those of us who rush in to buy a bottle of wine may not know about. We start by taking the staircase that goes down to the basement, located in the middle of the shop's first room. There are wines from a hundred vintages; these are the wines that someone who wants to drink a wine from the year they were born requests, or they buy them as gifts, because perhaps there is no more unusual birthday gift than a wine that is as old as the person who made it.

The week Horribilis of Adif and Renfe has not yet finished. After Five consecutive days of chaos in rail transport, this Saturday two new breakdowns have collapsed the network again, in this case the high-speed one. Early in the morning, another problem in a catenary, now at Sants station, has forced a fast train from the Ouigo company to stop in the middle of the exit tunnel from Sants. In turn, the incident has paralyzed all high-speed train traffic and this has also affected users of Renfe AVE and those of the Italian company Iryo.

Some time ago, Barcelona City Council made a fortune with a campaign to promote local commerce that said: "There's everything in the neighbourhood." In the case of Sants, this slogan became literal. At least between the 60s and 70s, when in one of the shop windows of one of the emblematic shops in the neighbourhood there was even a live lion. The owner of the shop and the beast and the protagonist of this story was Vicenç Febrer.