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Posts Tagged ‘spain’

Heat-Resistant Grapes for Wine

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on March 21, 2023| 2 Comments »

Photo: Josep Lago/AFP/Getty Images.
Ancient grape varieties in the laboratory at the Familia Torres vineyard near Barcelona. 

Here we go, Humans! More adapting.

Today’s story is about pragmatic grape growers adapting to climate change by seeking out grapes that can handle more heat. Too bad they have to do this, but what they learn may help other growers — and all of us.

Ashifa Kassam covers the topic for the Guardian: “The ads – tucked in the corners of local newspapers and directed at winemakers – began turning up across Catalonia in the 1980s. ‘If you know where to find any uncommon grape varieties, please get in touch,’ they read.

“Dozens of tips came pouring in, shepherding Miguel A Torres in his search for long-forgotten wine grapes. But it wouldn’t be until a decade later, as the climate crisis began wreaking havoc on vines, that the fourth-generation winemaker realized his foray into the past could play a key role in tackling what lies ahead.

“ ‘I simply wanted to recover the heritage – the ancient traditions and vines – left to us by our ancestors,’ said Torres, the president of Familia Torres winery.

‘And then we realized that some of these varieties take longer to ripen, meaning they might be able to help us in a warming world.’

“It was a glimmer of hope as the wine industry grapples with a changing climate. Extreme weather, drought and steadily rising temperatures have laid bare a crop that is extremely sensitive to change. In Spain, rising temperatures have meant grapes ripening more quickly, leaving winemakers rushing to harvest in hopes of protecting the carefully concocted balance between the fruit’s sugars and acidity.

“ ‘Climate change is the worst threat the sector has ever faced,’ said Torres. …

“In California, vintners are embracing grapes such as mourtaou, a nearly extinct variety from south-western France, to create peppery reds, while some in France’s Cognac region are toppling more than a century of tradition to trial climate-resistant grapes. In Bordeaux, concerns about the climate crisis recently helped to secure the approval of six new grape varieties, including castets, a disease-resistant variety that had been on the brink of disappearing.

“The reasons these grapes fell into disuse varies widely, said José Miguel Martínez Zapater, the director of the Institute of Grapevine and Wine Sciences in La Rioja. Some were abandoned in the late 19th century as the phylloxera plague forced European grape growers to chase efficiency, while others were discarded as winemakers sought to comply with strictly defined appellations or consumer preferences for certain grapes.

“Martínez Zapater’s publicly funded institute is one of several across Spain that have been peering into the past to bolster wine grape diversity – a years-long process that involves identifying the varieties, testing out their characteristics and seeking official approval for their use. … ‘People are finding varieties in different areas that they consider interesting.’

“In Spain – home to a €5bn-a-year wine production industry [$5,390,000,000] whose production outpaced all other EU countries in 2021 – much is on the line. Last year, the country experienced its hottest year since record-keeping began; since 2015 the country has sweltered through four of its hottest years on record.

“At the Agrarian Technological Institute of Castilla y Leon, known as ITACyL in Spanish, two decades of research have led to the recovery of more than a dozen varieties of grapes. The list includes estaladiña, a grape whose last recorded reference stretches back to 1914, and cenicienta, a grape close to extinction before it was revived to make fruity reds.

“ ‘The wines they make are very distinct and interesting,’ said José Antonio Rubio Cano, who heads the viticulture and woody crop department at the institute. … He stressed, however, that the embrace of these long-overlooked varieties is just part of the broader efforts needed as the industry adapts to a changing climate. ‘There’s no one solution,’ said Rubio Cano. ‘It has to be a set of things; we have to pay more attention to the vines, be more aware of how their fruits are ripening and we need to develop a deeper understanding of the vineyard and the different varieties.’ …

“The Caserío de Dueñas vineyard is taking the institute’s research to the next level, planting hectares of eight of the recovered varieties to test out how the grapes behave in a real-world scenario.

“ ‘I find it super-interesting,’ said Almudena Alberca [who in 2018 became Spain’s first female master of wine and is] the technical director for Entrecanales Domecq, the vineyard’s owner. ‘The possibilities are endless.’ …

“Four decades after Torres placed his first ad seeking forgotten grapes, Familia Torres has begun releasing small quantities of wines made from the fruits of his quest, such as forcada and pirene. The wines tell a story that is both steeped in the past and nods at the enormous challenge that lies ahead as the climate crisis tightens its grip, said Torres.

“ ‘I’ve always said that the wine sector is the canary in the coal mine,’ he added. ‘The consequences that vineyards are living through right now should make everyone take notice.’ ”

More at the Guardian, here. No firewall; donations encouraged.

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Unknown City in the Pyrenees

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on September 1, 2022| 11 Comments »

Photo: El País.
A Corinthian capital and fluted drum with a shaft located in a city discovered at the foot of the Pyrenees in 2018.

Do you ever wonder what sort of report archaeologists of a future civilization would write about your town? What if they had only the location and a few crumbled buildings to go on, no contemporary testimony? That was the plight of a group of archaeologists in Spain who investigated a “new” ancient city.

Vicente G. Olaya says at El País that archaeologists were surprised that they didn’t know the name of a recently unearthed city, but there were simply no historical documents mentioning it.

“In 2018,” he says, “the City Council of Artieda — located in northeastern Spain in the province of Zaragoza, and part of the country’s Aragon region — asked the University of Zaragoza’s Archaeology Department for help in studying some ruins located around the San Pedro hermitage, known variously as El Forau de la Tuta, Campo de la Virgen, or Campo del Royo.

“Three years later, the experts have confirmed that these sites formed a large single archaeological complex, and they detected two phases of occupation on the surface of the site: one during the imperial Roman period (the 1st to 5th centuries) and another during the early-medieval Christian era (the 9th to 13th centuries). Now, the research team has published the results in a report, El Forau de la Tuta: A Hitherto Unknown Roman Imperial City on the Southern Slopes of the Pyrenees. …

“The report notes that based on important evidence from the ruins preserved in the hermitage, as well as artifacts held in various public and private collections and the findings at the site, the settlement was ‘of urban character — the city’s name is currently unknown — and it developed during the [Roman] imperial period. Later, the same site took on another iteration as a rural habitat during the Visigoth and early Andalusian periods.’

“The specialists have also found that, between the 9th and 13th centuries, another peasant habitat-type town or village was superimposed on top of the Roman settlement. They have identified the village as Artede, Arteda, Artieda or Arteda Ciuitate. The medieval enclave’s ruins include the apse area of the church, which was part of the San Pedro hermitage; numerous silos with circular openings, which were excavated from the subsoil and only perceptible by geo-radar; and an extensive cemetery consistent with Christian burial rites. …

“The El Forau de la Tuta site is located 1.5 kilometers from Artieda’s city center, on the fertile plain of the Aragón River. … It is possible that the site’s dimensions are even larger and that it extends to other — still unexplored — agricultural lands.

“The Roman settlement stood next to the road connecting three northern cities. … Currently known as Camino Real de Ruesta a Mianos (the High Road from Ruesta to Mianos), the road lasted through the Middle Ages as a stretch of the French Route, the Arles Way or the Via Tolosana (Tolouse Route), as part of the Way of St. James (Camino de Santiago). …

“Inside the hermitage, the study’s authors have identified two Corinthian capitals, three Italic Attic bases, a classical Attic base, several flat-edged fluted shaft drums, and a fragment of cornice. The huge dimensions and typology of the artifacts indicate that they came from several early [Roman Empire] public buildings. … 

“The study confirms that these pieces come from at least two different monuments. Their typologies indicate that they were sculpted more than half a century apart, ‘which demonstrates a prolonged period in the process of monumentalizing the city.’

“To the west of El Forau de la Tuta, next to the San Pedro ravine, ‘an impressive set of public works made of opus caementicium (the Romans’ early version of concrete) including at least four sewer outlets, a powerful massive abutment, a foundation, and a series of quadrangular structures,’ possibly supply cisterns, is also preserved. … The presence of these works is typical of urban settlements, where water drainage was a problem that had to be addressed, especially in relation to buildings, such as bath houses, that produced a large amount of water waste. …

“Archaeologists are also currently studying a sculptural fragment that is preserved in an Artieda private collection. The artifact — which was collected near the hermitage — is an incomplete, nearly life-sized left hand that holds a patera umbilicata [an offering bowl], which would have been part of a statue representing an offering figure. …

“In the first round of excavations in 2021, the archaeologists confirmed the existence of an intersection of two roads. ‘On one of the roads, possibly one of the settlement’s main streets, we documented the ruins of a sidewalk and a surface channel for draining water, which pedestrians could circumvent by means of three steppingstones.’ …

“In one of the excavations they performed, the archaeologists found ample remains of black and white mosaics made with tesserae (small cubes of stone or glass) and fragments of rudus (a layer of material placed under the tesserae). …

“Inside this structure, under a large number of slabs that fell in the building’s collapse, archaeologists found a practically complete black-and-white tessellated pavement (with some isolated red and yellow tesserae); it was extraordinarily preserved. Decorated with iconographic motifs in white on a black background, it has shells or scallops in the four corners, while the central emblem features seahorses, ridden by little Cupids, facing each other next to three representations of marine animals, a fish in the upper part and possibly two dolphins in the lower part.

“Thus, the archaeologists are certain that everything they’ve found so far ‘corresponds to a single urban complex from between the first and second centuries, and that the city had infrastructure and public monuments, including baths, a water supply system, regular urban planning, sewers, and possibly a temple.’ ” 

I can’t help thinking about the way early archaeologists (Schliemann, say, at Troy) barged in and dug at random, destroying historical records. Imagine how carefully and boringly the archaeologists in today’s story had to sift every little thing to discover the town built on top of the Roman city — and date both!

More at El País, here.

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A Monk Builds a Cathedral

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on June 9, 2022| 4 Comments »

Photo: Denis Dobrovoda.
Justo Gallego Martínez, 2018, in the cathedral he built in Mejorada del Campo, Spain. The self-taught monk even made the crypt he wanted to buried in.

I often wondered about the investment of time and money that went into places people wanted to be buried. In the case of Egyptian Pharaohs and Chinese emperors, it had to do with what they believed would happen after death. But what about European kings and queens? It’s hard to understand.

Today’s story is about a contemporary monk who built a crypt for himself as part of building a cathedral — alone.

Matthew Bremner writes at the Guardian, “One late spring evening in 2018, Justo Gallego Martínez said he would show me his grave. The old man was warming his hands by a stove in the dim back room of his cathedral. A dusty film coated the concrete floor. The shelves and tables were full of relics, screws, chipped wood, crushed glass, half-eaten loaves of bread. A bare hanging bulb cast the room in jaundiced light.

“ ‘I want to be buried here,’ Justo said, signalling around him to the cathedral’s cavernous nave and the 20 trembling towers sprawled across thousands of square feet of his own land on the outskirts of Madrid. … He’d be buried there because it was his cathedral.

He’d designed it entirely in his head, without a single measurement or calculation on paper, without a record of any of the materials he’d used. And he had done it largely by himself. …

“Outside, the uncovered frame of a dome, 35 metres high and 10 metres wide, loomed above us. The nave lurched around 45 metres to our left, covered by a half-barrel vault whose exposed beams curved upwards like a whale’s ribcage.

“The rest of the cathedral was an architectural Frankenstein’s monster propped up on mismatched bricks, tires, wheels, food cans, plastic and excessive quantities of concrete. Large chunks of the building were already in decay, invaded by moss and rising damp. In the aisles dusty cement bags were piled as high as the first-floor gallery. Other rooms erupted with broken tiles, dismantled cement mixers, motorbikes, rotten wood, oxidised saws, festering ropes, chicken carcasses and plastic bags fossilised in pigeon shit. It sprawled over an area the size of a football pitch. …

“Next to the shrine, the floor opened to the darkness of the crypt below. This hole was where it had all begun, Justo said. Here, he had first started to dig, and to formulate his vision. …

“In early 2018, I came across an article in a local paper about an ex-monk building a cathedral in Mejorada del Campo, just outside Madrid. For almost 60 years, with no help or architectural expertise, Justo Gallego Martínez had been constructing a cathedral that was almost the size of the Sagrada Familia, using waste and recycled materials.

“When the monk started his project, the locals had called him a madman. Since then he had fought with family members, made enemies and won an adoring international public. He had never gained formal permission to build the structure, which meant it was illegal. …

“As I got to know Justo better, I realized that he was a mess of incongruities. He could be open-minded and bigoted, forgiving and stubborn, kind and brusque, wise and simple. He was a flawed genius, who never sought to be named as such. …

“Justo’s early life was marked by religious fervor, political upheavals and health problems. As a boy, he was very close to his mother. ‘She was the one that taught me the words of the Bible,’ he said. At an early age, he had to leave school to escape the dangers of the Spanish civil war, which ravaged Madrid and its surroundings. His mother’s teachings were a vital part of the little education that Justo would receive.

“The young man had always dreamed of dedicating his life to God. … At the age of 27, he entered the monastery of Santa María de Huerta in Soria, northern Spain. Many of his fellow monks found him strident and difficult; he would work longer hours than necessary and often pray into the night. Insisting on remaining teetotal, he even refused to drink the wine during communion. ‘They were very suspicious of me,’ he once told local journalists. ‘They said I was breaking the rules.’ …

“Justo told me that after he was rejected from the monastery, he went to Mejorada del Campo and fell into a ‘funk,’ what we might consider depression. … Where would he channel his religious fervor? What could he do with himself that would mean anything? It was in the midst of this self-questioning, he said, that it came to him – the idea to build something for his creator: a cathedral, which would demonstrate his willingness to sacrifice himself for God.

“So, in 1961, he started to dig.

“Justo worked feverishly. Alone, he barrelled mountains of dirt, scaled scaffolding with no harness and soldered with no mask. Sometimes he would have visions. Laying bricks, he would suddenly remember the holy trinity, drop to his knees and weep. …

“Justo came from a relatively well-off family who owned land near Madrid. Over the years, he sold much of it to fund the construction of his church. He also relied heavily on charity. …

“Justo hated sharp angles and straight lines and tried to avoid them at all costs. He preferred curves and circles – vaulted ceilings, domes, arches, rounded chapels, annular altars and spiral staircases. ‘God made all things round. He made the planets round. He made the earth round.’

“To make circles he would bend metal rods around columns and draw around circular water drums or tins of paint. But making curves was more difficult. They were expensive and had little tolerance for error. A millimeter of imprecision in one step could culminate in a spiral staircase that didn’t quite reach its landing.

“The curve Justo loved most was the dome, which was modeled on St Peter’s basilica in Rome. With large blue metal girders curving up to a pressure ring at its centre, it looked like a mechanical spider atop the nave. The dome took him 30 years to imagine and seven years to build. It is the only thing I ever heard him boast about. …

“Justo made up for his technical shortcomings by devising strange solutions. He piled empty paint cans on top of one another and filled them with concrete to make columns. He bent corrugated iron rods and fed them through slinky-like springs to create the structure for arches. When the columns he built were too short, he filled the gaps with clumps of iron, piling them up like mismatched books to the height of the support beams. He’d then solder them together. …

“Soon there was interest from local newspapers. Then the national press came, followed by journalists from abroad. At the end of 2003, photographs of Justo’s cathedral appeared in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. …

“The cathedral became even more famous in 2005 when it appeared in an advertisement for a new soft drink made by the Coca-Cola Company. Justo only agreed to the advert to get funds to continue building. He wasn’t thinking about cash, only more bricks. Indeed, when the commercial was shot, Justo had no idea of the consequences of his decision: ‘I didn’t know it was going to be on TV. I thought they were just going to print something on the side of the can.’

“There was an irony to the advert’s success. While Justo had tried to embody temperance and humility, one of the world’s biggest brands had turned his abnegation of the ego into the exact opposite – a celebration of individual accomplishment. The ad had made his faith synonymous with ambition, his devotion with perseverance, and his sacrifice with self-interest.

“Over the years, tens of thousands of people have come to visit the cathedral. They all want to see Justo – to touch him, to hear him speak, to understand him, his inspiration, his genius and his imagination. I saw old ladies kiss him, pilgrims accost him and fanatics pitch him with all manner of schemes for the future of the cathedral.

“People often talked about him in saintly terms. They marveled that, during almost 60 years of construction, he had suffered no significant injury. Carlos Luis Martin, an architect who helped Justo at the cathedral, recalled witnessing an accident: ‘I was working in the crypt. Justo tripped over a stone and fell and smashed his head on the ground hard … “God has healed me, and now all is fine,” he said. And there was not a scratch on him.’ ”

Read the article at the Guardian, here. No firewall. Justo Gallego Martínez died on 28 November 2021.

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Ancient Wall Carvings Found

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on August 27, 2021| 6 Comments »

Photo: IPHES.
Archaeologist makes a 3D scan of the prehistoric cave art at Font Major in Spain.

Without going into space and littering it with our detritus and conflicts, there are plenty of unknowns here to satisfy our taste for exploration. In this article from ArtNet News, we learn, for example, about a recent discovery made in Spain that opened up a whole new batch of mysteries.

Javier Pes writes, “Experts have discovered a cave full of prehistoric carvings in northern Spain. Among the hundreds of rock carvings, some believed to be 15,000 years old, are vivid depictions of horses, deer, and bulls, as well as a wealth of mysterious and abstract symbols. Unlike the famous prehistoric paintings at Altamira, also in northern Spain, the recently discovered cave art in Catalonia is carved directly into the soft surface of the rock.

“A team of archaeologists stumbled across the richly decorated cave at the end of October 2019. … Josep Maria Vergès, who led the team from IPHES (the Catalan Institute of Human Palaeoecology and Social Evolution) described the find as ‘exceptional’ in a statement, and compared the cave to a ‘shrine.’

“The cave art is now being recorded and studied using 3D scanning technology. The engravings were created on a layer of soft sand deposited on the cave’s surface in an area that is difficult to access. The artworks are extremely fragile. … Several figures seem to have been damaged in the past by visitors who were unaware of their existence. Experts are now studying the best way to preserve the remarkable finds.

“Vergès tells Artnet News, that he felt a ‘mixture of surprise and disbelief, followed by great satisfaction,’ when the he first saw the ancient works of art. ‘Surprise because the cave is not an ideal place to find engravings due to the characteristics of the rock, the walls were very irregular, and the specialists thought that it was not suitable for painting or engraving.’ …

“The oldest art in the cave is believed to date back to the Late Stone Age, or Upper Paleolithic period. The earliest cave paintings at Altamira date from the same period, although they are around 20,000 years older. 

“Researchers uncovered the art within a nearly two-mile-long complex of caverns about 60 miles from Barcelona called the Cave of Font Major, which was first discovered in 1853. Parts of this cave complex, one of Europe’s largest, are open as a subterranean museum, although the specific stretch containing these carvings is closed to the public. …

“[In a related event] anthropologists working at Abri Blanchard in France’s Vézère Valley announced in 2017 the rediscovery of a 38,000-year-old rock engraving. It depicts an aurochs, or wild cow, and rows of dots. That ancient image is believed to be one of the earliest artworks found in Europe.”

More at ArtNet News, here.

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Shakespeare Script Found

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on September 21, 2020| 12 Comments »

Photo: John Stone
While researching Scots economist Adam Smith, a Canadian academic found an edition of Shakespeare’s last play in a Scottish Catholic college in Spain!

Sometimes when scientists are doing basic research with no practical application in sight they land on the missing piece to understanding a rare disease. And when conservationists preserve some creature no one else cares about, the world may later find that the creature is essential to a whole ecosystem. Unexpected discoveries are often the best kind.

Meanwhile, in the department of Treasures Found While Seeking Something Else, there’s a delightful report at the BBC on the unsought discovery of a rare copy of Shakespeare’s last play. No one would have found it if they were looking for it.

Reevel Alderson from BBC Scotland writes, “The Two Noble Kinsmen, written by Shakespeare with John Fletcher, was found by a researcher investigating the work of the Scots economist Adam Smith. …

“In the 17th Century, the seminary in Madrid was an important source of English literature for Spanish intellectuals. The Two Noble Kinsmen was included in a volume made up of several English plays printed from 1630 to 1635.

“Dr John Stone, of the University of Barcelona, said he found it among old books in the library of the Real Colegio de Escoceses — Royal Scots College (RSC) — which is now in Salamanca.

” ‘Friendship turns to rivalry in this study of the intoxication and strangeness of love,’ is how the Royal Shakespeare Company described the play, which is based on Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale.

“It was probably written around 1613-14 by Shakespeare and John Fletcher, one of the house playwrights in the Bard’s theatre company the King’s Men. …

“Described as a ‘tragicomedy,’ the play features best friends, who are knights captured in a battle. From the window of their prison they see a beautiful woman with whom they each fall in love. Within a moment they have turned from intimate friends to jealous rivals in a strange love story which features absurd adventures and confusions.

“Dr Stone, who has worked in Edinburgh and Aberdeen, said: ‘It is likely these plays arrived as part of some student’s personal library or at the request of the rector of the Royal Scots College, Hugh Semple, who was friends with the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega and had more plays in his personal library. …

” ‘In the 17th and 18th Centuries, collections of books in English were rare in Spain because of ecclesiastical censorship, but the Scots college had special authorisation to import whatever they wanted.’ …

“The rector of the Scots College, Father Tom Kilbride, said the college was proud such an important work had been discovered in its library.

“He said: ‘It says a lot about the kind of education the trainee priests were getting from the foundation of the college in Madrid in 1627, a rounded education in which the culture of the period played an important part. To think that plays would have been read, and possibly performed at that time is quite exciting. There was clearly a great interest in Spain at that time in English literature.’

“The RSC no longer trains men for the priesthood in Scotland, but offers preparatory six-month courses for those expressing a vocation, and holds regular retreats and conferences for the Scottish Catholic community.” More at the BBC, here.

Hat tip: ArtsJournal.com.

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Making the Earth into a Sandwich

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on August 25, 2020| 6 Comments »

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Photo: Etienne Naude
“I felt that I was making something bigger than me,” said Angel Sierra (right) after he and Etienne Naude made the Earth into a sandwich with pieces of bread 8,000 miles apart.

I love any attention-getting gag meant to show we are all part of one world. This story describes a feat that seems silly on the surface, but draws attention to something deep. Eight thousand miles deep.

As Owen Amos reported at the BBC in January, “Two men in New Zealand and Spain have created an ‘Earth sandwich’ — by placing bread on precise points, either side of the planet, at the same time.

“The man behind the sandwich, Etienne Naude from Auckland, told the BBC he wanted to make one for ‘years,’ but had struggled to find someone in Spain, on the other side of the globe. He finally found someone after posting on the online message board, Reddit.

“The men used longitude and latitude to make sure they were precisely opposite. That meant there was around 12,724km (7,917 miles) of Earth packed between the slices — and some 20,000km between the men, for those forced to travel the conventional route.

“The first ‘Earth sandwich’ is credited to the American artist Ze Frank, who organised two slices of baguette to be placed in New Zealand and Spain in 2006. …

“Wanting to create his own, Mr Naude, 19, used an online longitude and latitude tool called ‘tunnel to the other side of the Earth’ to find his exact opposite point. …

“He posted on the Spain section of the online message board Reddit. He got ‘a few replies’ and found one person close to the precise location.

Angel Sierra, a 34-year-old chef, told the BBC he replied to the message because ‘it can help to show how people can work together across the globe … I felt that I was making something bigger than me.’ …

“Once the men were in contact, then came the tricky part — making a sandwich with another person when you are on opposite sides of the planet.

” ‘It was quite hard to organise since it’s 12-hour time difference,’ Mr Naude said. ‘And there’s lots of things to arrange, such as the kind of bread, the time, the [precise] location, et cetera. … It’s quite tough to find a spot which isn’t water on the New Zealand end — and where public roads or paths intersect in both sides.’ …

“Using a ‘near top of the range laser cutter,’ he burnt an ‘Earth sandwich’ design onto 20 slices of bread, then used one slice to mark his exact, tightly defined sandwich spot in New Zealand.

“His counterpart used nine slices of unmarked bread to make sure he covered the exact spot. …

“The scientific name for points opposite each other on the Earth’s surface is antipodes … According to World Atlas, only around 15% of ‘territorial land’ is antipodal to other land. The UK, Australia and most of the US do not have antipodal land points — the other side of the world is water. More at the BBC, here.

Naude was later reported saying, “It’s also quite nice to just know that there is someone at the exact opposite point of the world that has done exactly the same thing as you. In this one particular instance, we’ve got entirely different lives, but we are now connected by this one point.”

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Drought Reveals a Spanish Stonehenge

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 19, 2019| 4 Comments »

spanish-stonehenge-1024x604

Photo: Ruben Ortega Martin, Raices de Peraleda
Drought has uncovered a Spanish version of Stonehenge, the 7,000-year-old Dolmen of Guadalperal.

As global warming brings changes to our planet, the permafrost is melting and releasing dangerous bacteria. But sometimes other, less harmful things come to light.

Caroline Goldstein writes at ArtNet, “If there’s even the slightest silver lining to the ravages of climate change, it’s that the warming conditions are revealing some previously unknown archaeological sites and artifacts.

“This past summer, an extreme drought in the Extremadura area of Spain that caused the Valdecañas Reservoir’s water levels to plummet has revealed a series of megalithic stones. Previously submerged underwater, the Dolmen de Guadalperal, often called the Spanish Stonehenge, are now in plain sight.

“Though the Dolmen are 7,000 years old, the last time they were seen in their entirety was around 1963, when the reservoir was built as part of Franco’s push toward modernization. …

“Angel Castaño, who lives near the reservoir and serves as the president of a Spanish cultural group, told the website the Local, ‘We grew up hearing about the legend of the treasure hidden beneath the lake and now we finally get to view them.’

“The approximately 100 menhirs are, like Stonehenge, hulking megalith stones — some standing up to six feet tall — that are arranged in an oval and appear oriented to filter sunlight. Evidence suggests that these stones could actually be 2,000 years older than Stonehenge.

“Castaño is working with the group Raices de Peraleda to move the dolmen before rains come and re-submerge them. ‘Whatever we do here needs to be done extremely carefully.’ he said.”

I guess so. I can’t help wondering if it would be better to move the reservoir and leave the stones, which obviously were placed where they are for a reason. But not being an engineer, I suppose moving the reservoir would be even more difficult. And already access to water is becoming a serious problem around the world. (For a heartbreaking story about the difficulty many Navajo people have getting clean water, read this.)

So hard to balance conflicting goods!

More here.

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Disability a Non-Issue at This Restaurant

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on August 10, 2019| 4 Comments »

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Photo: Universo Santi
This haute cuisine restaurant in Spain makes a point of hiring workers with disabilities.

I have posted a few stories about successful operations that hire workers with disabilities, but this is the first I remember seeing about a high-class restaurant set up for the purpose of creating jobs that don’t differ from jobs in establishments that don’t use workers with disabilities.

Stephen Burgen writes at the Guardian, “The first thing that strikes you is the calm, the light, the modern art on the walls – and then of course the food. It’s only later that you realise there is something different, and a little special, about Universo Santi, a restaurant in the southern Spanish city of Jerez.

“ ‘People don’t come here because the staff are disabled but because it’s the best restaurant in the area. Whatever reason they came for, the talking is about the food,’ says Antonio Vila.

“Vila is the president of the Fundación Universo Accesible, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to helping people with disabilities join the mainstream workforce. He has also been the driving force behind Universo Santi, the haute cuisine restaurant whose 20 employees all have some form of disability.

“ ‘I always wanted to show what people with disabilities, given the right training, were capable of,’ says Vila, who is a senior manager at DKV insurance. ‘They were not represented in the world of haute cuisine. Universo Santi has broken through that barrier.’

“The 20 staff, whose ages range from 22 to 62, were recruited from an original list of 1,500. To qualify, applicants had to be unemployed and have more than 35% disability.

“ ‘I feel really lucky to be part of this,’ says Gloria Bazán, head of human resources, who has cerebral palsy. ‘It’s difficult to work when society just sees you as someone with a handicap. This has given me the opportunity to be independent and to participate like any other human being.’

“Alejandro Giménez, 23, has Down’s syndrome and is a commis chef. ‘It’s given me the chance to become independent doing something I’ve loved since I was a kid,’ says Giménez, who lived with his mother until he was recruited.

“ ‘Working here has transformed my life. So many things I used to ask my mother to do, I do myself. I didn’t even know how to take a train by myself because I’d just miss my stop.’ …

“Universo Santi may soon have a star in the Michelin firmament as the Michelin Guide people have already sampled the menu which, at €60 (£53), is less than half the price of a typical menú de degustación.

“ ‘Of course they didn’t introduce themselves but we knew who they were,’ says Almudena Merlo, the maître d’. …

“The Jerez restaurant takes its name from Santi Santamaria, chef at the Michelin three-star Can Fabes in Catalonia until his sudden death in 2011. Can Fabes closed shortly afterwards but his family wanted to carry on his name and culinary tradition and were keen to support the Jerez project. …

“The family’s enthusiasm attracted the attention of Spain’s top chefs, among them Martín Berasategui, [Joan Roca of El Celler de Can Roca, twice voted the best restaurant in the world] and Ángel León, all of whom have contributed recipes and their time as guest chefs at the restaurant.”

More at the Guardian, here. The article also mentions other European enterprises that employ people with disabilities.

Photo: Universo Santi
Says Alejandro Giménez, a junior chef with Down Syndrome who works at Universo Santi in Jerez, “Working here has transformed my life.”

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Lost Arabic Poetic Tradition Survives in Hebrew

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on August 21, 2017| 1 Comment »


Image: Tom McShane
The author of those lines is an unusual 10th century figure — Shmuel HaNagid, prime minister of the kingdom of Granada in Spain, head of both Granada’s Muslim army and Andalusia’s Jewish community.

The force of history works in mysterious ways. Here is a story about how an ancient Arabic poetic tradition was preserved because Jewish poets valued it.

Benjamin Ramm reports at the BBC, “On 9 December 1499, the citizens of Granada awoke to a scene of devastation: the smouldering remains of over a million Arabic manuscripts, burnt on the orders of the Spanish Inquisition. …

“[Years before], as much of Europe languished in the Dark Ages, the Iberian peninsula was a cultural oasis, the brightest beacon of civilisation. Under the Umayyad dynasty, the caliphate of Al-Andalus stretched from Lisbon to Zaragoza, and centred on the Andalusian cities of Córdoba, Granada and Seville. From the 8th Century, the caliphate oversaw a period of extraordinary cross-cultural creativity known as La Convivencia (the Coexistence). …

“Among the Muslim poets of Al-Andalus, there was a concerted attempt to rediscover and reinvent the literary forms of Arabic, sophisticated and lyrical, rooted in the concept of fasaaha (clarity, elegance). The fire in Granada destroyed part of this heritage, but it survives in an unexpected form – in an imaginative body of Hebrew poetry, which illustrates the extent of cross-cultural exchange.

“Peter Cole, the foremost translator of Hebrew poetry from Al-Andalus, argues in his book The Dream of the Poem that a major legacy of the Moorish writers was to inspire Jewish poets to emulate their work. … The innovations were initiated in the 10th Century by Dunash Ben Labrat. …

“Controversially, Ben Labrat adopted Arabic poetic metre, and was accused of ‘destroying the holy tongue’ and ‘bringing calamity upon his people’. But the Hebrew renaissance that followed produced some of the most beautiful poetry in the language, and the period became known as the ‘Golden Age’ of Iberian Jewish culture. …

“At a time of intercommunal tension, it is tempting to idealise this Muslim-Jewish period of mutual flourishing. There are critics who argue against the notion of La Convivencia – some have called it a ‘myth.’ … Documentation about communal relations during this period is scant, [and] the extent of ‘coexistence’ continues to be a subject of passionate disputation. …

“The kingdom of Granada was the last territory to fall to the Christian Reconquest in 1492, after which Jews were forcibly converted or expelled. Saadia Ibn Danaan, a rabbi who wrote prose in Arabic and poetry in Hebrew, transmitted the tradition to North Africa.” Read more.

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Micro Theater Storms Spanish-Speaking World

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on August 3, 2017| Leave a Comment »


Photo: American Theatre
A scene from “Mentiras Piadosas,” by the troupe Los ImproDucktivos. That’s the audience watching from behind the Venetian blinds.

Theater people keep thinking up new ways to create work that moves you in an immediate and intimate way and that attracts new audiences. We’ve written about theater in taxis in Iran and dramatic productions conducted one-on-one, among other experiments.

Now from Spain comes micro theater, 10-minute plays that allow you to stand in the same room with the actors.

Felicity Hughes writes at American Theatre, “On a rainy Thursday night in Madrid the bar of Micro Teatro Por Dinero is packed with a young crowd of theatregoers waiting to catch a short performance in one of the five tiny rooms in the venue’s basement. When our number is called, we’re led into a small dark room where the audience sits pressed up against each other sardine fashion on tiny stools.

A door is flung open, immediately breaking the fourth wall as a distressed young man stumbles in and sits down on my knee in floods of tears.

“ ‘Never before has there been a theatre so close, so intimate, and so open — there are no preconceptions, no limits, no censure,’ says Miguel Alcantud, the inventor of micro teatro, an abbreviated form of theatre. …

“The concept has since become so popular that the Micro Teatro Por Dinero franchise has been sold to venues in 15 different cities around the globe, including Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Lima, Lebanon, even Miami. …

“ ‘The cost of putting on a show is very small, and we change the program every month,’ Alcantud continues. ‘We don’t mind if the piece works or doesn’t work, because we’re always putting something new on. The commercial success of a single show doesn’t matter so much.’ …

“ ‘You feel as if you’re breathing alongside the public and they’re breathing with you,’ says [Juan Carlos Pabón, a Venezuelan actor]. ‘We’re dealing with a lot of emotion inside a scene and a lot of attention. There’s not as much artifice, so it’s a tough discipline; the public are really concentrating on you, and notice the good along with the not so good.’ ” More here.

The director in Miami says audiences seem to prefer comedies to dramas. I can see why. If you are going to be that up close and personal with strangers, you probably want keep things light.

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Street Art on Trucks

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 18, 2016| 3 Comments »

Street art is not just for stationary walls any more. According to Kate Essig at WNYC radio, some pretty amazing specimens are now on the move.

“Art in Spain got a sweet new set of wheels thanks to the Truck Art Project,” she writes. “In this collaboration between a transport company and the local art community,  street art takes the form of stunning mobile murals on  — you guessed it —  trucks.

“The project works with popular urban artists like Javier Arce, Suso33, and Marina Vargas to take their works off the wall and put them in motion. …

“The goal of the project is to make contemporary artwork accessible to all, even if it’s just a surprise sighting at a stoplight — so those in Spain who aren’t frequent gallery go-ers can still glimpse this art on the go.” An inspiring array of truck-art photos can be seen here.

And be sure to check out the project website, which reads in part, “Truck Art Project is an original art patronage project launched by the entrepreneur and collector Jaime Colsa, and curated by Fer Francés in contemporary art and Óscar Sanz in urban art. …

“The trucks working with the project will be the gigantic backdrops for the artworks. The initiative thereby becomes a living display of the most current tendencies in the country’s painting, drawing, and urban art (although the ambitious program intends to be even more multidisciplinary, involving other art forms such as photography, music, or cinema), away from the confines of a museum and aimed at non-traditional spectators and contexts that don’t usually lend themselves to contemporary art.”

Photo: Panci Calvo
This freight truck was painted by artist Okuda San Miguel for the Truck Art Project.

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Generating Electricity from Plants

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 26, 2016| 2 Comments »

John is a great source for articles on cutting-edge technologies. He sent me this one Thursday about using plants to make electricity. The students in Spain who designed the technology are nothing if not ambitious. Their goal is to have the whole world covered in trees making electricity. You can watch their video, below, or bear with me as I channel Google Translate’s English rendition of a Spanish blog post.

, at Blog Think Big, says, “Thanks to Bioo system, created by the students of the Autonomous University of Barcelona and Ramón Llull University with the startup Arkyne Technologies, families could cover their basic electricity needs through 10 × 10 meters of vegetation panels. But how?

“The prototype initially created by the students of the UAB is a plant in a pot that lets you charge a mobile phone. … According to the explanation for the 4YFN space last Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the system ‘generates power 3-40 watts per square meter from some vegetable panels and a biological battery that takes energy waste (matter organic) that plants need not despise.’ [Oops: that has to be Google. Shall we change it to ‘plants don’t need’?]

“Thus, the device is able to steadily produce electricity through a self-supply system. In addition, according to the engineers, the operation does not affect the plants and is economical. …

“Students are betting on a ‘smart city’ concept that allows people using Bioo buy or sell electricity. The goal, in addition to developing these systems in homes, [is to extend them to] agriculture or green roofs of public buildings.”

Maybe you better watch the video. But there’s more here, if you read Spanish.

Video: Bioo Lite

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Sheep Crossing. Be Patient.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on October 7, 2013| 2 Comments »

Here is an annual spectacle I’d love to see.

“Shepherds led a flock of 2,000 sheep through the streets of Spain’s capital and largest city on Sunday, in defense of ancient grazing, droving and migration rights that have been increasingly threatened by urban sprawl and modern agricultural practices.

“Those urban settings were once open fields and woodlands, crisscrossed by droving routes. Since at least the year 1273, the country’s shepherds have had the legal right to use about 78,000 miles of droving routes around the country to move livestock seasonally between summer pastures in the cool highlands and more protected lowland grazing areas in the winter.

“Every year, a handful of shepherds defend that right in Spain’s capital city.”

I guess it’s use it or lose it. Plus it’s good to make people think about where their food and wool come from, and whether things have changed for the better.

More from the Associated Press.

Photo: Andres Kudacki/Associated Press
Shepherds led a flock of 2,000 sheep through some of Madrid’s most sophisticated settings on Sunday.

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New Arts-Business Partnerships

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 25, 2013| 2 Comments »

Matadero was an old abandoned slaughterhouse in Madrid. Lately it has been “evolving into a cultural laboratory, where a new arts financing strategy is being tested.” So says Doreen Carvajal in the NY Times.

“Companies and institutions are providing financial support to supplement dwindling government arts subsidies, but with a twist: they don’t just send checks, they move in.

“Within the walled 59,000-square-foot center, there are public theaters and exhibition spaces that last year drew more than 500,000 visitors for music and art events and avant-garde plays. But five new residents are private institutions, including a designers’ association, a publishing house’s foundation and offices of Red Bull, the Austrian energy drink maker.

“They are in the compound rent-free for now, but have invested millions in the remodeling of pavilions there, as well as in programming, from art exhibitions to music festivals.

“These new partnerships are forged, out of necessity, here in Spain, where government support for culture has plunged by almost 50 percent over the last four years, a result of a lingering economic crisis that hit late in 2008.”

Some observers worry about the downsides of corporations having a big influence on what art gets shown, but haven’t the arts always had to have some help from patrons or companies?

Probably it pays just to be wary, to recognize when there is undue influence, and to push back. Certainly smaller, more experimental projects are unlikely to find a home under a Red Bull banner.

Read more at the Times, here.

Photo: Carlos Luján for The International Herald Tribune
Inside Matadero Madrid: A closer look at the arts complex.

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