With Christmas on the horizon it’s time to break out of your conservative imbibery, to take a long hard look at all those jazzy bottles lined up on the barman’s shelves – and dare to drink something different. Watch out over the next couple of weeks for  regular doses of useless but possibly inspiring tipple-related [...]

It’s estimated that around three quarters of Spanish vocabulary is derived from vulgar Latin. Add on another six-ten per cent from Arabic, and you’ve still got another 15-20 per cent to play with. So where do all the other words come from? In vague historical order, mainly: Basque, Celtic, Greek, Visigoth, Catalan, Portuguese, Gallego, German, [...]

I’m not really into nostalgia wallowing or grumpy-old-woman rants. True, in my first years here, the Rambla wasn’t overrun by stag and hen parties in ‘Quiero Cerveza’ T-shirts—and there was no Starbucks! Huge trucks roared straight through the city along Aragón and the Avenida del Generalísimo (aka Diagonal). There was no ring road, much of [...]

Between Two Fires: Guerrilla War in the Spanish Sierras is a gripping and deeply moving new book about “Spain’s forgotten war” by award-winning journalist David Baird written after five years of painstaking research. Published by Maroma Press

By Valerie Collins 1993. Aznar and Felipe have just had their big pre-election debate on TV. My son, aged eight, born into democracy and the Autonomous Community of Catalunya, is worried. “If Aznar wins, will it be like Franco?” Apart from the moustache, what was Franco like? Fade to Barcelona, 1973, the tail end of [...]