Catch Cuba while it’s still there, people say… Get a taste of the island and its revolutionary quirks before the opening-up of relations with the USA sweeps all its strange tropical-Soviet otherworldliness away, and it becomes just like any other country, like… (what? In this part of the world, maybe, the Dominican Republic, that shining success story). Cuba […]
You first see it as you come down a long slope, rising up ahead of you out of the sunflower fields of Andalusia like a CGI-created palace in some post-Tolkien fantasy movie. Closer up, its gleaming maroon-and-white domes and eight strange towers have a look that’s more a mix of local Andaluz baroque, Buddhist stupas, […]
There are places everybody’s heard of, so everybody goes to, and others that you discover just by accident. Recently, without ever really having planned it, I found myself spending a week in Écija. Where is Écija? It’s in the middle of the dusty plains of Andalusia, roughly halfway between Seville and Córdoba. Mention it to […]
Es como París… It’s like Paris… I first heard this from an Argentinian about Buenos Aires years ago, long before I ever had the chance to go there. And it’s odd to see, now that I have been, how often Argentinians in general and Porteños, Buenos Aires natives, in particular still bring up this old image […]
Went to Manchester a couple of weeks ago, for the first time in years. And I was amazed: what’s amazing is just how new so much of it is, and how shiny new its new bits are. Go to Salford Quays (OK, not technically Manchester, but obviously part of the same entity) and you enter […]
Why is the world so crazy about Antoni Gaudí? His architecture is Barcelona’s number-one identity-badge and calling card, even ahead of its football club, for Gaudí-mania seems to reach even those lost souls who still respond to the name Lionel Messi with blank looks. When I was back in the city a couple of weeks […]
Whether or not you believe that something very special/awful/whatever is due to happen when the Maya Great Calendar Cycle ends on 21 December 2012, for the Yucatán’s capital of Mérida it will have one lasting presence: a brand new and very state of the art museum, the Gran Museo del Mundo Maya. Pushed through by […]
It’s surprising to find that Santiago, capital of Chile (not de Cuba or de Compostela), can look a little forbidding at first sight, at least if you head straight for the centre. The presidential seat the Palacio de la Moneda, a neatly-proportioned neo-classical mansion typical of the last burst of building of the Spanish Empire […]
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