By Ramon Vila & Marta Cuatrecasas

Just in case any of you are experts in this kind of thing, here’s where I’m at:

Data collection is fine. My Garmin eTrex Vista HCx doesn’t get near the sales claim that “Deep foliage, nor canyons phase the rugged eTrex Vista HCx”–it gets lost quite easily between quite modest buildings in down-town Barcelona–but it’s OK.
Data [...]

A popular photography course, copied from a neighbourhood magazine produced by Alejandro Pérez, an enterprising Nou Barris estate agent, encountered on this walk:

I imagine the Bayeux Tapestry was planned in similar fashion.

Étienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (excerpt) is his novelised idealisation of Napoleonic nationalist totalitarianism: if not exactly a New Jerusalem, then certainly a New Paris, built around a New Seine, designed by its dictator, the Icar. This book and its hype led hundreds of families, mainly French, principally artesans (sez James Chastain) to doom and [...]

Nice story here about underpaid author Thomas Kohnstamm, who wrote his Lonely planet guide without going to Columbia. (Or did he go there and have to deal coke to survive? LD is characteristically confused.)
Guidebooks are so superficial, and information online so plentiful, that there’s actually no reason now why they shouldn’t be written from [...]

Just before he died, says Cecil Parrott in The bad Bohemian, the author of The good soldier Švejk (that’s Shvake: “No one pronounces it Shvike–not even in Germany”) drafted a letter to the district police:
I, the undersigned, ask respectfully to be kindly given the necessary passport for a stay in Spain (Barcelona, Calle Rosellos [sic: [...]

Letters of Alexander Von Humboldt to Varnhagen Von Ense (GBS):
On the 9th of June, 1839, Varnhagen writes in his diary: “Humboldt agrees with me in the assertion made by me at different times, that too much cannot be inferred from the silence of the historians. He refers to three highly important and undeniable facts, which [...]

Mr. T. was struck with the number of lunaticks confined in the several provinces of Spain:

Emanuel del Mar, Nuevo guía para la conversacion, en español é inglés (1839, via GBS):
Una golondrina no hace verano. One swallow does not make spring.
Both spring and summer are used in both languages, but you’d kind of expect northward migration to take swallows to Spain in spring and then England in summer. Perhaps we don’t [...]

The other night I stayed with a neo-peasant Catalan hippy couple living in a grace and favour masia in the hills, for which you and I and anyone else without the requisite ethnic badge would probably have to lay down something in the region of €750K. The guy, son of Andalusian barkeepers, agreed that affection [...]

Along with stuff like the banning of the sardana and of Catalan, this is another of the absurd lies told about the Franco regime by Catalanist victimists and by those they manage to con, typically left-leaning Brits and Americans. Here, for example, is the Lonely Planet entry on Barcelona, which is presumably taken seriously at [...]

Urquhart, The Pillars of Hercules, Or, A Narrative of Travels in Spain and Morocco in 1848: “I observed, on a placard, the two following signs of progress and civilization, in titles of new works: ‘The defender of the fair sex,’ and ‘The Ass, a beastly periodical.’ The words were ‘Il Burro, periodico bestial.” Re the [...]

Genetic data doesn’t actually suggest that the Turks brought it with them and then rebranded themselves as Etruscans in order to sell into European markets.

The sheep and goats above have just arrived back in Plan from low pastures to spend the summer in the mountains, rather like schoolchildren coming back from a language exchange. Joaquín Costa’s Colectivismo agrario en España (1898), available in full on Corde, contains a number of accounts of communal herding arrangements in the Pyrenees:
The town [...]

This is the anjova (Pomatomus saltatrix) caught off Galicia. According to Europa Press, fisherman Pablo Oliver got in touch with the Spanish National Research Council/Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas and the Institute of Oceanography/Instituto Oceanográfico to tell them of his discovery and to enquire as to why this fish was in waters outside its known [...]

I’m unreliably informed that Real Zaragoza star Ewerthon Henrique de Souza’s dad couldn’t spell Everton rather than Erewhon (buy USA/UK). Not that anyone gives a feck, but by all means keep the tips flowing.

Andrew Scull digs up and burns Foucault in the TLS:
Foucault’s account of the medieval period fares no better in the light of modern scholarship. Its central image is of “the ship of fools”, laden with its cargo of mad souls in search of their reason, floating down the liminal spaces of feudal Europe. It is [...]

With transportation delays of as much as six to nine months and very limited shipping capacity, this is surely a project less suited to MIT than to Correos, the Spanish postal service.

Here, from Emil Helfferich (1878-1974)’s Südostasiatische Geschichten (Jever/Oldenburg, 1966), is an account of what happened to another German-speaker who made light of girlie-men: