The Lenin-loving Joves Comunistes are the miniscule youth-wing of the increasingly insignificant alphabet soup of confused post-communists headed up by the bed-hopping Catalan regional interior councillor, Joan Saura, whose police force shot and almost killed the Barcelona municipal police chief last week. (”Youth” in Spanish leftist politics means anyone who wears jeans; most of them [...]

Xavi Caballé mentions an oft-cited Catalan etymology of paper:
1249; del ll. papyrus, i aquest, del gr. pápyros ‘papir’, adaptat per via semiculta a una terminació catalana, d’on passà a les altres llengües europees
AFAIK the Enciclopèdia Catalana has never substantiated this. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie francaise says:
PAPIER n. m. XIIIe siècle. Issu, par l’intermédiaire du latin [...]

Ah, but how long before it is rebuilt as a theme park? Plaza de San Felipe Neri is one of the most interesting examples of the latter in Barcelona. Only in the demolition of marginal and shanty towns have Spanish planners approached the rigour of the Chinese authorities. Half of the valley of Torre del [...]

From the Swedish Military Archive, this purports to show Vendôme at the head of some 32,000 troops bombarding Barcelona in the final stages of the Nine Years War:
Wikipedia: “The garrison capitulated on 10 August, but it had been a hard fought contest; French casualties amounted to about 9,000, and the Spanish had suffered some 12,000 [...]

Huge numbers yesterday on this walk, on some very quiet meadows at between 400 and 600m. First Gonepteryx rhamni, our Brimstone:

Next is I think a Clouded Yellow, Colias croceus:

Then Papilio machaon, macaón in Spanish, Common swallowtail and a host of other names in English. We saw a couple of dozen:

A swallowtail story from The child’s [...]