Returning to Barcelona for a visit I’m reminded of why I loved to lived there and why also I left the city. It is beautiful, modern, vibrant, yes, but cars choke its corazón, noise deafens you, metro crowds unsettle you, and you flee to any corner where there is even just the muted noise of distant cars let alone pure silence. Continue reading “Photo Essay: Barcelona Streets”
Tradition is an invaluable body of thought and practise refined, perfected, and revised over generations, inherited by the young from the old. But tradition can be both a blessing and a burden, and habit can limit the imagination. To think freely you need to break out of old rhythms, try new things, experiment. Continue reading “The Au Naturel Pedro Ximénez: Visiting Ximénez-Spínola Vineyards”
Malaga province’s Caminito del Rey achieved fame and infamy for being one of the most dangerous walking tracks in the world. Closed down for years after two rock-climbers fell to their deaths, the Caminito has now been restored and reopened to public access, allowing visitors to safely stroll through the canyons and valleys through which the track winds. Continue reading “Photo Essay: Man vs Nature on the Caminito del Rey”
Hidden from my sight behind the column of smoke bellowing out from an old fifty-five gallon drum sit the heroes of the night: two big round men with two big round zambombas secured between their two big round thighs. Continue reading “¡Zambomba! Celebrating Christmas in Jerez”
Every year in Arcos de la Frontera, a small but spectacular hilltop village in Spain’s south, the local people create what they call Belen Viviente, a living nativity scene or living Bethlehem. Visitors walking through the streets and plazas see bakers, iron-smiths, weavers and farmers working and living as if it were a typically brisk December’s night in Palestine some 2016 years ago. 2016 years on, millions of Marys and Josephs continue seeking room at the inn, still to no avail. Continue reading “Photo Essay: A Living Nativity Scene in Arcos de la Frontera”
The abandoned Palmera Plaza Grand Hotel is emblematic of Jerez de la Frontera’s period of boom and bust in tourism and construction. Having opened its doors as a five-star, luxury hotel in the heart of the city centre, Palmera Plaza now festers in disrepair; attracting vandals, fire-bugs and the curious to explore its apocalyptic interior. Continue reading “Photo Essay: The Ruins of Jerez – Palmera Plaza Grand Hotel”
In the golden age of the Persian Empire there was a community of thinkers, Sufis they were called, whose poetry and song celebrating wine, love and spiritualism had them demonised by the pious as heretics, debauchees and drunks. Their Holy Trinity was their lord, love, and leisure, and for them the three could not be separated: if God was love, then love was god, in all its amorous array. Continue reading “Leonard Cohen (1934-2016): A Sufi Maestro”
Whether enjoyed as a glass of red after work or a copa of fino with friends, wine is a beautiful thing. But there is in every glass a drop of some grape-picker’s or bottler’s sweat running from their brow to your lips, and this salty note should be savoured as much as the wine itself, but some disagree on how much value it adds. Today, in Jerez de la Frontera, home of sherry wines, conflict ferments over bodega workers’ pay. Continue reading “A Bitter Drop: Conflict in the Bodegas of Jerez”
Jerez’s Santiago Quarter, famed for its gypsy and flamenco culture, came alive today with a procession of an enormous gilded float through the barrio’s streets and laneways. A group of men carried upon their shoulders a figure of a tormented Jesus Christ on the road to Calvary. After hours of slow manoeuvring around the tight corners, the figure was finally delivered to the newly renovated Church of Santiago, where it will rest until next year’s Semana Santa celebrations.
Lives and Times 