Writing on the World Around Us.
From the sea the old man comes. I didn’t see him enter, only exit, as if he had never been on land. He is brown and round, his belly protrudes over skinny legs, and his back is bent. He is nude, and moves slow. Continue reading “The Seduction of the Sea”
Our Lady of Carmen, the seamen’s protector, is every year taken from her shrine in Church of San Cibrán out to the sea, o mar, where her melancholic face looks down into the depths searching for the sunken souls of this town of seafarers. Continue reading “Our Lady of the Sunken Souls: Festa do Carmen”
Before Christ, before the Emperor Augustus, in the isolated lands of Gallaecia, there was a Celtic culture which peppered the highlands and coastlines of modern-day Galicia with their hill-top settlements. On these stone castros the Gallaeci built their civilisation Continue reading “Unearthing Gallaecia: The Ruins of Monte O Facho”
The Romantics said that experience is heightened, deepened, by the sublime – the feeling of marvel mixed with fear at the sight of raw natural beauty: a mountain’s peak, an ocean’s depths, the desert’s breadth… On the Cíes there is this sublimity… Continue reading “Atlantic Island Explorations IV: A Return to the Real on the Illas Cíes”
Marco Polo took half a lifetime to reach the Orient, another half to return to Venice. My ancestors took half a year to reach the antipodes, and they never saw their homeland again. Today it takes half an hour to cross a country, half a day to cross a continent. Continue reading “The Space-Time Contraction”
Onto whose face did she gaze: her lover or kin, her faithful or subjects? Why was she so adorned: to accentuate her power; sacred, secular, or sensual? Continue reading “Looking on the Lady of Elche”
For hundreds, thousands of years, the cities of London, Paris, Istanbul, Barcelona, were enclosed behind the stones of Rome. Built during the unstoppable march of the Emperors, these walls remained long after the legions abandoned their cities to the Barbarian tribes of the north. All of them have since been lost to us today, destroyed to the imperatives of urban expansion. Continue reading “The Eternal Wall of Lucus Augusti”
The smell of salt and seaweed, the sway of the waves, the cries of the seagulls, the lapping of the water, the wind in the sails and the force of the rudder, the spray on your cheeks and the chill of the air: these are the sensations of the sea through which the blind can navigate; feeling a landscape which they cannot see. Continue reading “The Sensations of the Sea: The Blind Sailors of the Rías Baixas”
Though the plains are wide and open, they tend to divide. They divide us into those who feel free with a far horizon, and those who feel the unconfined space uncomfortable, preferring instead the texture of the mountains or the energy of the sea. Castilla y León is a land of plains, and from its ochre earth have grown kingdoms of old and cities of architectural awe. Continue reading “On the Plains of Spain: Castilla y León (Photo Essay)”
