Heralded as the cradle of Spanish Christendom, for centuries the alpine sanctuary of Covadonga has been a site of miracles for the faithful, a haven for the pilgrim. But today, Covadonga’s spiritual significance becomes universal, as a sacred site for the biosphere during the age of the anthropocene.
Continue reading “The endangered sublime of Covadonga, Asturias”
In the city of Chennai, the images of deities carved in stone, moulded in bronze, adored in temples, are given life in dance and find their voice in song through the Bharatanatyam, the millennia-old classical dance of Tamil Nadu. Continue reading “The Living Deities of the Bharatanatyam: A Photo & Audio Essay”
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”
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)”
The peninsula of Morrazo is what happens when three deep valleys are flooded by a rising sea, leaving behind a chunk of land where the hills roll into the harbours, where oceanic currents carve out countless inlets and coves, where the terrestrial world is the deepest green and the marine world thee deepest blue. At the heart of this verdant peninsula lies the Cangas do Morrazo, a town whose soul is of the sea. Continue reading “Cangas do Morrazo: A Soul of the Sea”
Lashed by winds, cursed with salt, pummelled by wave and current, the Alentejo and Vincentine Coast is the archetype of an Atlantic environment. Marking continental Europe’s western-most extreme, this natural park in Portugal’s Algarve offers the traveller one hundred and twenty kilometres of immense beaches backed by towering dune systems, of lonely headlands receiving the brunt of the ocean’s energy Continue reading “Atlantic Explorations III: The Elements of the Algarve (Photographic Essay)”
“Sleeper number six” the mustachioed train conductor tells me, “…but run!” he commands. Sprinting across the platform an old man calls “fast!”, and another elderly woman yells from the carriage “get on!” just as the Mandovi Express releases her breaks and starts rolling forward through the sprawling expanse of Mumbai, through the hills of Maharashtra state and the flats of Goa, through eighteen provincial stations and on into the her last stop at Margao, nearly six hundred kilometres south of the megacity of Bombai. Continue reading “Journey on the Mandovi Express – A Travel Log”
Ten insufficient days in India, a land which needs ten weeks, ten months, ten years, for the traveller to come to comprehend the complexity of the innumerable faiths, languages, landscapes, and peoples that constitute Hindustan. In ten days this traveller arrived confused, but left captivated. Continue reading “Kaleidoscopic India: A Photographic Essay”
Lives and Times 