The Tepid Take

The Monastery of Poblet, nestled high in the hills of the province of Tarragona, Catalonia, has played a vital role in the history of the ancient Crown of Aragon. As the Crown’s pantheon, each king was buried high in those hills, ever since its foundation in the marriage of the County of Barcelona and Kingdom of Aragon. However, the long line of successive kings buried there was put to an end by Ferdinand II: He broke the oath promised centuries before to instead be buried with his queen, Isabella, La Católica, in Granada. Ferdinand was the first king of what Spaniards call the Monarquía Hispánica: a great pan-Atlantic empire and precursor to the modern Spanish state. However, Ferdinand was for the most part secondary to his wife, Isabel, given that she controlled the then far more powerful and populous Crown of Castile. The role of Ferdinand’s homeland, the Crown of Aragon, and its most powerful province, Catalonia, was from then on firmly tied to the whims of the Castilians, und

One of my favourite phrases of all time – a phrase that constantly re-invites its own relevance - isn’t even a quote: it’s the name of a piece of art. El sueño de la razón produce monstruos , or, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, is the name of an etching by Spanish Enlightenment artist Francisco Goya (granted, most people have heard of this bloke). What I love about the name is that, while its intended interpretation is entirely valuable - that when we cease to keep a watchful eye on our society, citizens corrupt themselves and breed ignorance - translating sueño as ‘dream’ instead of ‘sleep’ can lend an entirely new interpretation. While the “dream of reason” was not the intentional concept Goya aimed to describe, it is an excellent metaphor to describe how the Enlightenment ideas espoused by Goya and his peers in Spain & across the world could eventually be used to derail human flourishing instead of working in its favour; that the glorification of reason would l

This piece was also published in CityMetric in 2018. Perched on a mesa in the middle of a wide Andalusian plateau, Ronda is a sleepy Spanish town much like any other. Its inhabitants number a meagre 35,000. The nearest city, Malaga, is 100km to the south. The town is unassuming from a distance.  And yet, as a place, Ronda has been home to more than its fair share of famous figures; since the 19th century, an air of romanticism has led artists from Irving to Rilke to Welles to Hemingway to visit Ronda, and write no shortage of poems and prose dedicated to the city. This was no doubt a testament to the town’s stalwart atmosphere; it is cited as the first home of bullfighting and maintains an almost village-like contiguity even in spite of its size. But if any one monument defines Ronda’s ubiquity in the Romanticism of old, that monument would be the Puente Nuevo, the New Bridge, which spans the Guadalevín river cutting the town in two. The third of a series of increasingly elabora

Spain is a peculiar country for cyclists; a cruel divide between thankless highways with nary a cycle lane in sight and beautiful, delineated tree-lined cycle paths in the cities that could bring themselves to it. In this regard, it’s not a far cry from the state of the UK – except many a British town, most notably my hometown of Ipswich, made a questionable half-effort to make the town cycle friendly, with paths flanked by parking and irritatingly necessary “shared spaces”. In Spain, they either go the whole way or they don’t bother. Why might this be? How can my local bicycle repairman help us get to the bottom of things? And why did I spend almost a year swerving out of the way of pedestrians, goats and a lone chihuahua? Allow me to answer at least two of those questions, and maybe the third if you’re feeling lucky. A good place to start would be clearing up the nonsense title; as any budding geographer will tell you, Bournemouth is famously not located in Iberia. Rather, it wa

This is the first in a series of ten Year Abroad posts I will be writing this summer. They will deal with a range of topics, from culture, to history, to the positively urbane. This first one is mostly about the nominal experience of the year abroad, and how technology has changed it. One of the things I lost on my year abroad – besides four folding bikes, two pairs of trousers, and, annoyingly, the ability to speak fluent English, was my old laptop: a beastly thing with almost 5 years of solid service. While I never made a habit of taking my laptop into university to study, preferring to stick to a paper and pen and the occasional library computer, I found the machine an essential component of my year away nonetheless; seeing as it enabled me to watch Peep Show at my leisure as long as I had it around. While most British television channels use region-locked online players, YouTube, Netflix and the like circumvent this. Yet this wonderful boon is in fact a double-edged sword,