Paco “El pocero”–in Wales he’d be called Jones the Drains–is Francisco Hernando, the 57-year-old illiterate building a €6B, 13,500-house development, Spain’s largest ever, in a village near Madrid, whether the mayor likes it or not, and he doesn’t. The mayor, Manuel Fuentes, is receiving police protection, and Alfredo Urdaci wants to know what happened to…
I’ve always thought of freemasonry in Spain as being roughly analogous to free black Christian sects in British colonies: providing a substitute channel for social organisation for those denied legitimate political and trade union activity. However, I’m still pretty ignorant about this kind of stuff, and so here I’ll pass on a couple of interesting…
In 1939, in a piece in La Revolución Nacional desde la Universidad. Cursillo de orientación nacionalsindicalista, José Pérez de Barradas, director of the Museum of Prehistory in Madrid, wrote that “we Spanish are not ethnically European. Thanks to God, Africa begins in the Pyrenees [the phrase is famous and Dumas]; we are neither Alpines nor…
Time, August 17 1936: Along the dusty roads of Lusitania Spanish peasants last week saw a sight that white men had not seen in 450 years: Moorish tribesmen, bearded and burnoosed, swinging their long brass-mounted rifles on the way to fight in Spain. News of the march caused grim chuckles to a ginger-bearded fat gentleman…
Few here are both able and willing to read any language but their own, so there has been a sudden burst of excitement concerning the translation into Spanish of the memoirs of Felix Schlayer. Schlayer was a Swabian engineer and the inventor of the Heliaks (PDF, $$$), a helicoaxial threshing machine. He was also Norway’s…
Because it was built that way when it opened in 1916 and it would have cost too much to change it when road transport switched to the right in the 1920s.
This is the promised translation of the chapter in Pío Baroja’s serialised novel The adventures, inventions and mystifications of Silvester Paradox / Aventuras, inventos y mixtificaciones de Silvestre Paradox (1901) in which Silvester takes up with an English conman, quack, amateur pugilist and exponent of inventions such as the translatoscope called Macbeth. The source is…
There’s a terrible piece by James Sturcke in the Guardian today on the statute of autonomy. It repeats various stale myths about Barça having been a focus of anti-Francoism (links: debunking of football results, piece on recently demonstrated connections between the Barça board and the Spanish ultra-right) and gets its statute facts badly wrong. Some…
Boadella of Ciutadans has a sound bite: “Just as there are the ill who believe themselves Napoleon, so there are collectives who believe themselves a nation.”
Vallecas officially became part of Madrid in 1950. Here‘s a gallery of some of the village elders. Barcelona’s Gracia district has been centrally administered for much longer, but has an even stronger sense of space- and time-capsulity.
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