Under the waters, in the skies, how many shades of blue can be seen in the Ría de Aldán? On the ridges and in the shallows, how many greens? Continue reading “Light and Life on the Ría de Aldán”
Light and Life on the Ría de Aldán
Life as a Dream: The Allure of the Pre-Raphaelites
Leaping ahead of the aesthetic norms of their own time, a group of young artists in nineteenth century England brought with them the legacy and lore of past worlds to create something wholly new, a body of work whose creators took on the name of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a movement whose manifesto celebrated the romantic, the imaginative, and the natural. Continue reading “Life as a Dream: The Allure of the Pre-Raphaelites”
The Seduction of the Sea
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 the Sunken Souls: Festa do Carmen
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”
Unearthing Gallaecia: The Ruins of Monte O Facho
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”
Atlantic Island Explorations IV: A Return to the Real on the Illas Cíes
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”
The Space-Time Contraction
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”
Looking on the Lady of Elche
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”
The Eternal Wall of Lucus Augusti
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”
