Worldcrunch
As the negative effects of overtourism intensify in popular destinations across the globe, some communities are mobilizing to prevent tourists from taking over their cities, whether its vigilante water gun attacks or blocking construction or buying up local real estate.
The prize-winning García Márquez library in Barcelona has joined the ranks of the Catalan city’s designer buildings, showing with its runaway popularity the enduring appeal of civilizing, communal spaces.
Increasingly extreme temperatures are forcing summertime cultural events and festivals, from concerts to Spain’s traditional castell human towers, to adapt to a new climate reality.
The cities of Amsterdam and Bruges may inspire the Portuguese capital to reinvent its approach to tourism. As Porto launches an experimental new vision map designed to disperse tourist flows, could Lisbon do the same?
Daniel Esteve, the founder of Desokupa, a company specializing in the extrajudicial eviction of squatters, has become an important player in Spain’s far-right politics. This investigation by Laura Galaup and Dani Domínguez for Spain’s La Marea shows how Esteve built his image and profitable company on fake news and hate speech.
The competition dreamed up by Spain’s former soccer star Gerard Piqué is developing at breakneck speed in Spain, and beyond. Thanks to a fun format and rules borrowed from a number of other sports, it is attracting a younger audience, which is something advertisers are keen to see.
-Opinion- Two European cities, two terror attacks. In Finland, 18-year-old Moroccan Abderrahman Mechkah is suspected of stabbing two women to death and injuring eight others in the southwestern city of Turku on Aug. 18. Mechkah is believed to have been specifically targeting women but also ended up wounding the men who tried to defend them. […]
MADRID — As a freelancer without a fixed salary, I’m rather desperate to buy a studio apartment, something to help ground me in these turbulent times and provide at least some measure of financial security. So far my search has focused on two places: Mexico City and Madrid. The former has a well-established reputation for […]
L’Esportiu, March 9, 2017 FC Barcelona’s stunning victory over France’s PSG last night at Camp Nou earned a succinctly shocked (and triumphant) front-page headline in the Catalan-language sports daily L’Esportiu. For those linguists keeping score at home, L’Impossible (“The Impossible”) reads exactly the same in the Catalan and French languages. Headlines in France, though equally […]
Carmen Balcells, literary agent to some of the greatest Spanish-language writers of our time, died this past weekend in Barcelona. One of the novelists she discovered, Isabel Allende, pays tribute.
La Razon, May 25, 2015 “Instability,” reads the Monday headline of conservative Madrid daily La Razon, after the strong showing of two upstart parties in Spain’s local and regional elections threatened the longstanding two-party duel between the Popular and Socialist parties. The conservative Popular party of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy suffered its worst local results […]
The disaffected youth and religious radicals in the Muslim world are obsessed with Europe’s top football leagues. Testimony of an Italian reporter, who was held hostage earlier this year in Syria.
Peace is a process, never a single event. Negotiations for peace are always far more complicated than the public understands, and the results are not always miraculous. Even so, the majority of modern conflicts — 80%, according to the School for the Culture of Peace in Barcelona — eventually end after negotiations. The school’s reports […]
The Catalan Igualada Hockey Club has long been one of the best ice hockey clubs in Spain, both the men’s and women’s teams. But due to a recent lack of sponsorship and a cut in subsidies caused by the ongoing Spanish economic crisis, the company decided it could only keep the men’s squad. The women’s […]
The German soccer clubs Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich (whose flags you will see strategically placed below) recently thrashed Spanish teams Real Madrid and FC Barcelona in their respective Champions League semifinals. German Sky sports seized the opportunity to taunt the two teams before their recent games. And after Bayern’s defeat of Barcelona Wednesday night, […]
EFE, EL MUNDO DEPORTIVO (Spain); CLARIN (Argentina); CALCIO MERCATO (Italy) Worldcrunch VATICAN CITY – Argentina happens to be blessed right now with the world’s greatest active soccer player and the current Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church. On Wednesday, the two Argentine icons got a bit closer when Pope Francis was presented with the No. […]
BARCELONA – Bas van Abel brought a novel idea to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The 35-year-old Dutch entrepreneur is currently at work, with ten others, on the first “FairTrade” smartphone – a phone that will contain no gold mined in war zones, will not be assembled in a soulless Chinese factory, and will […]
CLARIN (Argentina), EL PAIS (Spain) Worldcrunch BARCELONA – This so-called Robin-Hood pursuit, which appeared to come to a head in March 2009, is back on again. It was four years ago that the then 32-year-old Catalan man, Enric Durán Giralt, was sentenced to prison by a Barcelona judge for stealing from banks — and giving […]
LE MONDE (France), DW-TV (Germany) EFE Worldcrunch From London, Barcelona, and Rio de Janeiro, the list of cities worldwide that are being enticed by the allure of suspended cable cars is growing, heralded as a cheap, green and safe means of transport suspended above the normal rush of urban traffic. Although the cable car systems […]
HET LAATSTE NIEUWS (Belgium), THE SCOTSMAN (UK) Worldcrunch After Catalonia stepped up its bid to secession, separatist parties in Belgium and the United Kingdom have made major gains amid a crisis-hit Europe. British Prime Minister David Cameron is set to meet Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond in Edinburgh Monday to sign a historic deal that […]
THE TELEGRAPH, THE GUARDIAN (UK), LA TIMES (US) Worldcrunch An 11-year-old Brazilian boy born without feet has been invited to train at FC Barcelona’s youth academy. After impressing the Spanish football club during a TV appearance on Brazil’s TV Globo, the young whiz kid will travel to the Catalonian capital in September. The Telegraph reports […]