Guess which country in the Western world has just shut down it's locale version of CNN to start to broadcast a "Big brother" 24-hour channel ( Read more... )

When the Spanish Civil War was about to be finished, the democratic governments of Spain (National, Catalan and Basque) seeked refuge in one of the northernmost municipalities of the country, very close to the French border. The place was a lovely little village called La Vajol, which is placed overlooking the planes of the Empordà and over 700m ( Read more... )

The Catalan parliament is debating a proposition tomorrow to ban bullfighting. Thankfully, the two largest political parties have given freedom of vote, so the parliament only needs 67 votes from the 135 diputats.

This is getting some part of the country hysterical. This law comes from 140,000 signatures gathered from the streets. I signed for it, ( Read more... )

Big news here: Our king Juan Carlos has been through lung surgery.

Remarkably, the king goes to private clinics for check-ups (notably in Navarre and Barcelona, never Madrid) but had the 3-hour surgery in a public hospital, Hospital Clínic de Barcelona (one that mondragon knows) .

Here's the official communiqué from the royal office and some news in English

( ( Read more... )

Your surely don't know but Spain is about to get swept by an ultra-conservative revolution. Yes, we might be the largest country in Europe with a social-democrat party ruling now but this is going to change soon.

First of all, the Catalan constitution (what we call "Estatut") was appealed at the Constutional Court four years ago. The Court has ( Read more... )

Exactly 30 years ago, a concert was celebrated in the Civil Engineering School of the Polithecnic University in Madrid in honor of the drummer of a group who had just died in a car accident.

This meant the birth of "La Movida"

Since my generation is quite a descendant of those times, it's something to celebrate. La Movida was so "modern" that we all ( Read more... )

Spain has finally chosen Soraya and the song "La noche es para mí" as TVE's representative for the ESC.
The song is very topical, I think. Judge yourself

Click to view

It's full of ESC topics... Well, at least it's somewhat decent, although there's still this trend of mixing Castillian with some English. Oh well

( Read more... )

 Spain's Primer Minister (which we call President) José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was at the United Nations. I have googled news about him and I didn't get what I think it was one of the most important parts of his speech: He asked for the end of Death Penalty in 2015 and how financial aid for development should be kept at all costs. Of course, ( Read more... )

I just realized my ID card (which we call DNI, aka Documento Nacional de Identidad) is expiring next week. Therefore I need to renew it. I'm getting the new electronic ID ( Read more... )