The Art Explora Festival opened its doors this Wednesday at the Barcelona dock, in Port Vell, on its first stop in Catalonia. The event, which runs until April 6, offers free admission – with prior reservation to access the museum ship – and can be visited daily from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM, with the last entry at 7:45 PM.

The Art Explora Festival opened its doors this Wednesday at the Barcelona dock, in Port Vell, for its first stop in Catalonia. The event, which will run until April 6, offers free admission – with prior reservation to access the museum ship – and can be visited daily from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM, with the last entry at 7:45 PM.

The peasant revolt, expressed in noisy demonstrations, but also in provocative actions such as turning village entrance signs upside down, has inspired the new Brots festival, which will be held from October 30 to November 2 in several villages in the Baix Empordà region. It will combine music, dance, and visual arts as a tribute to a land where "for millennia, the people of the grove worked their backs off to extract green gold from the olive trees." Organized by the Musical Youth of Torroella de Montgrí, Brots is an anti-festival that deliberately distances itself, in terms of its conception and dates, from the large summer festivals that attract crowds and are mostly held by the sea. "It's an initiative designed for everyone, but especially for the people of the country and the farmers, and to highlight that hinterland that is discovered when you look at land and not at sea," says Martí Sabrià, festival advisor.

The dishes served at the Miramar restaurant in Llançà begin with scraps of paper, which chef Paco Pérez collects here and there and repurposes. Small works of art that eventually emerge from the paper to become edible sculptures, with flavor, aroma, and, above all, soul. Paco Pérez, with five Michelin stars, two of them for the cuisine he creates at Miramar, is considered the quintessential artist-chef. "He's always drawing. In a process of daily creativity, he captures each idea in a sketch on paper, to be interpreted and transformed by his team into a dish that often conveys the essence of the Mar de Amunt to the diner," explains the chef's son, the poet Guillem Pérez. Creating from the raw materials provided by the land he loves so much and that inspires him so much is one of Paco Pérez's obsessions, and he demonstrates this with gastronomic offerings such as Arroz en la Barca, inspired by rice dishes that were cooked "on the high seas, without seeing land, breathing the salty air that makes me feel it." Paco Pérez champions the presence in haute cuisine of the humble seaweed found in the waters of the Mar de Amunt, which embrace the Cape of Creus up to Cervera.