Spanish views from a small town

There is an association in Spain that has a web page with a red list. That red list is composed of historical structures in danger of disappearing. The structure doesn't have to have been involved in direct history, it can simply be part of the cultural heritage that changes as time continues. On the red list, this week were added some telleiras , or tile factories. There are two in Valga, one in Catoira, and another on this side of the Ulla across from Catoira, in the village of Quintáns. They were probably abandoned in the middle of the twentieth century, but had been producing at least by the end of the nineteenth century. The buildings were leased by a man from A Guarda, on the Portuguese border, who brought two Portuguese workers with him to run the factory. Eventually, he married a local woman, and after some years rented the one in Catoira, leaving the Quintáns factory because it had less production capability.  The best thing going for these artisan industries, was that...

Ah, the boom years. The years in which everything was being paved over with concrete. The years in which buildings appeared like magic mushrooms. The years in which land no one had previously wanted was sold for millions. The years fortunes were made. The years for which we are still paying.  In 1999, then-regional president Manuel Fraga got jealous of Bilbao's new Guggenheim Museum by Frank Gehry and Valencia's Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias (City of Arts and Sciences) by Santiago Calatrava. They were flashy new buildings that brought attention and visitors. Fraga (who had been Minister of Tourism under Franco and then recycled himself after the Transition to be democratically elected president of his native Galicia) wanted to leave behind such a legacy that he would be remembered forever. No, we won't be forgetting him any time soon. Or the treasury he emptied to ensure his remembrance.  He thought up a scheme to be built on Monte Gaiás, just outside and overlooki...

Yesterday I took a mental health day. It's a day in which I get in my car and go wherever I feel like going, leaving all responsibilities behind for one day. Yesterday I decided to go to Porto in Portugal. It's about two and a half hours away from where I live. I've been there before and I like the city. It's similar to cities I know in Spain, yet different enough to know I'm in another country. It's an old city and the first time I saw it was on a rainy day. Its tired buildings with crumbling façades, dirty ceramic tiles, and peeling paint made it seem ancient and poor. A row of houses.   It looked as if it wanted to retire from the modern world and rest quietly forever on the banks of its river. The next time I saw it, it looked old and poor but lively instead of tired. That day it looked like an old grandmother who threw on her brightest shawl and put on her reddest lipstick to go to the fair. The sun was shining hot and it was near the Eve of St. John,...