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, but 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 [...]

This seems a bit harsh on the Barça president but the comparison is a standard feature of any Spanish debate:

People I know are voting for the motion of censure on Sunday to fack this one off rather than in the expectation that the next one will be less of a mafioso. Some of the family [...]

A malfunction of the public address system produces a rather pleasing strobe:

At the end of this clip, a crude example of the wagon wheel effect, caused by what the brain, fooled by the camera, takes to be a succession of evenly spaced, identical Quercus ilex:

More educational train journeys here.

The May monsoon endowed plants with a Made-In-China verisimilitude:

Knee-scratching thistles are now several metres high, and Karik and Valya could have told you all about the monstrous dragonflies:
In the spot where just a moment or two ago there had lain a tiny dragonfly, there now moved a thick, long, log-like, jointed body with a huge [...]

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 [...]

This is the trailer (currently unsubtitled) for El infierno vasco, about the ethnic cleansing conducted by the nationalist government and the terrorists with a view to reducing the non-nationalist vote and thus achieving a pro-independence majority. The process, of which the latest episode is the removal of the constitutional right to use Spanish in schools, [...]

Mr Wu has added our Weird Shit Guarantee™ to the Baldie Tours FAQs in response to a suggestion from some New Jersey clients following a conversation with a rather unusual street-organ performer. It may deter as many as it attracts, but what the hell.

Photo 7 on this page shows a lamb being carried by refugees from villages on the Spanish side of the central Pyrenees as the Stalinist-led 43rd Division prepared its famous last stand–the Bielsa Pocket/la Bolsa de Bielsa–against Franco’s advancing Navarrans in spring 1938. Bielsa was completely shattered by the latter’s artillery, but the scorched earth [...]

Samuel Johnson reports on making acquaintance with London in 1737 that
In the last age, when my mother lived in London, there were two sets of people, those who gave the wall, and those who took it; the peaceable and the quarrelsome. When I returned to Lichfield, after having been in London, my mother asked me, [...]

The taz has been obligatory reading for the thoughtful German green-left for the last 30 years. It has no particular sympathy for airline companies or Joachim Hunold. Highlights from a piece published June 14 (via MM):
It is true [actually it isn't--but Tobias Büscher isn't the only one to make this error]: Franco prohibited regional [...]

I tend to concentrate on the Catalanist language nuts because they’re closer to hand, but Madrid has its own share of nationalist loons. For example, Amando de Miguel over at Libertad Digital is given to making unfounded claims about the dangers of English. I showed a while back that there’s no statistical basis for his [...]

Our entrance is barred by a little man with a beret and a moustache:
–You know this isn’t a bar?
–Of course!
–No problem then, I’ll get the landlady.
Later, in conversation with the landlady:
–Aren’t you worried by the EU ban on making your own vermouth?
–If this isn’t a bar then why the fuck would we be making our [...]

Being Barcelona Council’s corporativist scheme to marginalise private bike ownership and bike shops:

59euros is going round chaining random stuff to lampposts in protest at the council’s policy minimising facilities for non-council bikes and then removing perfectly roadworthy examples from the streets to make way for yet more council bikes and illegally parked motorbikes. Saltada Popular [...]

Here (thanks MM). So are you with Joe or against him? Does the Guernica page header mean the author identifies Air Berlin with the Luftwaffe? I thought only racists indulged in that kind of generalisation.

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 [...]

Some Civil War street plaques sound a dissonant note with respect to the official Popular Front “historical memory” dogma. St James’ chapel dates from the 17th century and, we are told by Sant Martí de Centelles council, “like the majority of churches in the Congost valley, was sacked and burned in 1936. Subsequently the chapel [...]

Three South Asian-British professionals (down from four last time, one having fallen to feminine wiles in the intervening biennium) emerge blinking from the forest at the end of this walk. My God, says one looking down, is that a mosque? And then remembers seeing a photo of it during his physics degree:

The idea seems perfectly [...]

Is not a gay bar but a lingerie-and-that-kind-of-stuff shop on the street in Barcelona named after Pi i Margall, Mr Pine and Wall barley:

Villa in c/ de l’Hortal, Carmelo, Barcelona apparently dedicated to books. The garden looks good. (Miquel Hortal i Arisó is probably the richest piano tuner in the history of Barcelona, inheriting from his father the estate on which a substantial part of the Carmelo was constructed.)

Wood ants descending rapidly en masse from a Quercus ilex on Montseny at the onset of a sharp shower:

Having spent several decades standing under trees waiting for the rain to stop, it is my firm belief that small ants do not flee from the rain as do big ones, although their level of activity [...]

Shite so cheesy it’s amazing the BBC didn’t beat PBS to it:

(Yes, head cheese, but shite cheese or cheese shite, probably not.)

Something puzzling me on V-E Day on May 8 last week: no one seems to have noticed that Ben Shahn’s Liberation is a French maypole scene. Here it is:

I believe from the MOMA@NY blurb that it draws on a Cartier-Bresson image, but I can’t remember whether this was intended to represent the liberation of France [...]

George Sandford has left a fascinating comment on this post, which deals with an amusing 19th century literary-historical hoax–purported correspondence between Ferdinand the Catholic and an esoteric global selection of fellow-monarchs.
George is family of the alleged editor, Brother Antonio the Goth, and thus of the Christian clan kidnapped by the Moors when they invaded [...]

When I’m in Barcelona we often go and have a Sunday lunchtime beer on a bar terrace near Park Güell, ethnic Andalusian with scatterings of La Mancha and the Maghreb. The other day there was a new guy, well-dressed, which is uncommon here, and reading El país, which is even less usual. I’ve never heard [...]

Samir over at View from Fez says that around 100 kids die annually from scorpion bites in Morocco. They’re quite common in Spain too. Here’s one in the gardens of Can Ferrero in Barcelona’s Zona Franca district that scared the hell out of me:

Quite a lot of the Barcelona mapping at OpenStreetMap.org is already more detailed and reliable than some commercial products I’ve seen, although I briefly thought Plaça dels Angels had been mapped by skaters. Whatever happened to the UPC Barcelona mapping party?

Watching Helen Mirren last night. Quoth the people of Spain: Elizabeth -> Bess not Beth because it was given her by her Andalusian seseo-masters. And one was snoring too hard to disagree.

Montjuïc cemetery publishes a little map which, interested in historical renown, guides you past the generally terribly tedious tombs of well-known Barcelona citizens (good, bad, ugly) and thus omits the quite extraordinary artistic achievements of some of its less well-documented residents. Here is one of the finest funeral monuments, built by people who have clearly [...]

“José Lone, natural de Madrid, casado con Francisca de San Pedro, de la que tenía un niño de 7 meses, de oficio tendero en la plazuela de Santo Domingo, núm.6, faltó de su casa desde el dia 2 de Mayo á las cinco de la tarde: su madre María Riscos dijo que tenía la [...]

This is the anarchist serial killer who, according to a good series of articles by Josep Maria Sòria in La Vanguardia in 2003,

in April 1936 shot dead Miquel Badia. (To be fair, Badia had it coming, as he himself acknowledged: failed regicide, fascist bootboy and strikebreaker for “our caudillo” Francesc Macià, head of security under [...]

Lucanus cervus (Ciervo volante) on the hills above San Juan de Plan in the Pyrenees of Huesca:

Proyecto Ciervo Volante writes:
Flight abilities seem, in principle, well developed. Fight speed reaches 6 km/h (D’Ami, 1981) but dispersal abilities are unknown. There are XIX century tales about mass movements (Darwin, 1871; Lacroix, 1968; Paulian & Baraud, 1982). [...]

One of the first times I played in public as a kid was at the local Polish club, and I remember trying to figure out what all these old folks were doing in this neighbourhood, amid numerous refugees from newer tyrannies in Asia and Africa and Latin America. After that it was a short conceptual [...]

“Originally built in 1901, this walkway now serves as an aproach to makinodromo, the famous climbing sector of El Chorro.” (H/t to the DG)

Mr Clarke blogging at It’s Probably The Pox, My Son links to a typical bit of mendacity, or gross ignorance if you are feeling charitable, from John Hooper at the Guardian:
Silvio Berlusconi, who won a general election earlier this month, welcomed the latest evidence of Italy’s leap to the right by declaring: “We are the [...]

Apparently it’s quite well-known, but I only found it this morning in HG Bohn’s A hand-book of proverbs (1855), in the household reading room:
To build castles in the air. Far castelli in aria.–Ital. The French say, Faire des chateaux en Espagne.
It is tempting although perhaps erroneous to believe that this derives from Frankish experiences with [...]

–¡Alfonso primero!
–¡Alfonso XIII!
Probably one of those time-space-specific things. Alfonso XIII strikes me as an infinitely superior as far as witless losers go, but I wasn’t there at the time.

John Chappell links to an old piece from the Stephen Roth Institute in Tel Aviv which claims among other things that “reports about Israel occupy a disproportionate amount of international space in the Spanish media”.
If their frame of reference is countries in a similar situation to Spain and and with a similar relationship to [...]

“In the sentence it is considered to have been proven that [in the church of St James of the Sword, Andalusia during a funeral] Refugio MS [74] approached the other woman saying, “I’m going to have your cunt, I’m going to have your cunt,” at the same time pinching her with her hand in her [...]

This delectable flor del mal from Barcelona’s Poble Sec district is a daisychain from A Nun’s link to a review of a book dealing with degradation and deviancy in the same neighbourhood. New York, April 26 1926:
Ushers with tall combs and white mantillas stole back up the aisles as the house lights faded out. The [...]