September is a particularly beautiful time to visit the Delta de l'Ebre: the rice harvest begins, summer birds start to leave, and those that will spend the winter in the Delta begin to arrive. In autumn, the still-flooded rice fields become vast feeding grounds for thousands of waterbirds.
Claire Fontaine and The Grandma have brought something essential with them today. Binoculars. And cameras. But, above all, patience. Both are passionate birdwatchers, and few places in Catalonia could offer them a greater reward than the Delta de l'Ebre. Here, watching birds is not simply about identifying species or collecting photographs. It means stopping, remaining silent and allowing the landscape to reveal itself.
Last Friday, they talked about a Delta shaped by human hands: rice fields, fishing boats, canals and generations of people who learnt how to live between river and sea. Today, they have come to discover another Delta. The one that flies.
The extraordinary biodiversity of the Delta de l'Ebre begins with its landscape. River, sea, bays, beaches, dunes, salt marshes, lagoons, riverside woodland, freshwater springs and rice fields coexist within a remarkably small territory. Each environment creates different conditions, and each attracts different forms of life. Its vegetation tells the same story of adaptation.
Near the sea, plants must survive salt, wind and shifting sand. Sea lilies grow among the dunes, while rushes, reeds and salt-tolerant vegetation occupy marshes and lagoons. Some plants have developed remarkable mechanisms simply to survive in soils where salt would make life impossible for many other species. Nothing here seems accidental. Every plant has found its place between fresh water and salt water, dry sand and flooded soil. And where different habitats meet, wildlife flourishes.
But sooner or later, anyone visiting the Delta looks towards the sky. Birds are perhaps its most spectacular inhabitants. More than 360 species have been recorded in the Delta over time, and the wetlands support internationally important populations of breeding, migrating and wintering birds. The area is consequently protected as a Special Protection Area for Birds and has been included in the Ramsar List of Wetlands of International Importance since 1993.
For Claire and The Grandma, this means paradise. There are the unmistakable flamingos, sometimes standing almost motionless in shallow water and sometimes suddenly transforming the landscape into a cloud of pink wings. There are grey herons and little egrets patiently waiting for prey; black-winged stilts walking on impossibly long red legs; avocets sweeping their delicate upturned bills through shallow water; marsh harriers flying low over the reeds; ducks, gulls and countless waders searching the mud for food. Some are residents. Others are only travellers. And this is precisely what makes September so exciting.
Claire and The Grandma have arrived at a time of change. September marks a transition in the Delta. The rice harvest begins. Summer visitors start their journey away from the wetlands, while other birds begin to arrive to spend the colder months here. For many migratory birds travelling between Europe and Africa, wetlands such as the Delta de l'Ebre are essential resting and feeding grounds. Their journeys may cover thousands of kilometres. Yet here, for a few hours or a few days, they stop.
A small wader walking along the mud may therefore have come from somewhere unimaginably distant. The bird Claire is photographing today may soon continue southwards. The one The Grandma is watching through her binoculars may not be here tomorrow. Perhaps that is part of the fascination of birdwatching. You are observing something that cannot be repeated.
The Grandma raises her binoculars. Claire prepares her camera. And then they wait. Good birdwatching requires something that modern life increasingly seems determined to take away from us: patience. You cannot ask a flamingo to move into better light. You cannot tell a heron to fly. You cannot persuade a shy wader to come closer because your camera lens is not powerful enough. You simply wait.
The Natural Park itself recommends morning and evening as particularly good times for observing birds and reminds visitors to watch and photograph wildlife only from the designated places, without disturbing it. And gradually something curious happens. The longer you remain still, the more you see. A movement among the reeds. A silhouette crossing the sky. A sudden call from somewhere across the lagoon. A group of birds landing in a rice field. The landscape that initially seemed silent becomes extraordinarily busy.
This is perhaps the greatest lesson the Delta offers Claire and The Grandmatoday. Nature is not scenery. The dunes are not merely beautiful shapes in the sand. The reeds are not decoration around a lagoon. The flooded rice fields are not simply mirrors in which photographers can capture spectacular sunsets. They are habitats. They provide shelter, food, breeding grounds and resting places for creatures whose lives depend upon the delicate relationship between land and water. And suddenly birdwatching becomes something more than a hobby.
To observe an animal closely is to become interested in its life. To become interested in its life is to understand what it needs to survive. And once we understand that, protecting its habitat no longer seems like an abstract environmental idea. It becomes personal.
The Grandma lowers her binoculars. Claire takes one last photograph. Somewhere above them, another group of travellers continues south. There is no passport control in the sky. Only ancient routes written into instinct, connecting northern Europe, the Mediterranean and Africa. And down below lies the Delta de l'Ebre: a place to breed, a place to feed, a place to rest. For humans, it is an extraordinary landscape. For millions of other travellers, it is something much more important. It is home -even if only for a while.
Baixo el Coll de Balaguer entre mel i gent pesquera i, com si es tanqués el mar, veig la Punta del Fangar. Brilla el far entre les dunes, la primera llum del Delta.
Mil ocells blancs em saluden quan travesso les llacunes: olor d'arròs, colors d'aigua, arbres grans i solitaris. Al fons, la sal de la Banya, des d'on la Ràpita canta.
Sota el capell de Montsià enfilo cap al Marjal,
de la vora del riu Sénia veig camins que van al sud: les mateixes oliveres... els mateixos garrofers...
Ebre amunt, ciutats antigues,
entre torres i campanes guarden les pedres dels íbers, les monedes dels romans, les cançons i l'art dels moros i les cases dels cristians.
Per hortes, barrancs i planes,
s'amaguen arbres i cases: pobles de gent sense pressa, que crida amb el vent de dalt,1 que pren el sol quan treballa i corre el bou quan hi ha festa.
Cap a les terres de dalt roques com les de Benet, serres com les de Cavalls i Pàndols, i un vi que porta alegria, inspiren pintors, artistes, somniadors de nit i dia.
I, al mig de tot, el gran Port que és la muntanya més alta: es pot veure, en dia clar, del Pirineu a Mallorca, el Coll de l'Alba, Cardó i tots els colors del Delta.
Diu que al Tossal dels Tres Reis, quan fa vent, sona una jota, i que la canten tres veus, tres veus que se saben entendre: Matarranya, Maestrat i la gran terra de l'Ebre.
Qui és qui sap d'on vé la jota, si puja o baixa pel riu, si arriba de dins del mar, o si la cantava un moro? Qui és qui sap si vé del mar, o el vent de dalt ens la porta?
Són paisatges i colors, són pobles, cases i pedres, són històries i són anys, són els hòmens i les dones.
Són sentiments, són amors... Són de la terra de l'Ebre.
The Grandma is wrapping up her final in-person classes. She has just a couple left before she begins organizing her students' internships.
That is why she has decided to get away for a few days to the Delta de l'Ebre. She knows the Terres de l'Ebre region well; in fact, she is in love with it.
Visiting the area means enjoying a unique natural landscape and excellent cuisine, but above all, it means enjoying wonderful people and very dear friends.
And she hasn't travelled alone. This time, Claire Fontaine has joined her adventures.
There are landscapes that seem to have existed forever, and others that remind us that the Earth is still being made. The Delta de l'Ebre belongs to the latter.
Here, at the end of the longest river entirely contained within the Iberian Peninsula, land and water have been negotiating their boundaries for centuries. The Ebre carried sediments from distant mountains and plains towards the Mediterranean, slowly depositing them at its mouth and creating a vast, flat territory where the horizon seems almost infinite.
But the Delta as we know it today is not only the work of the river. It is also the work of people. For generations, the inhabitants of these lands have learnt how to live in a territory where fresh water and salt water meet, where the sea enters the land and the land advances into the sea. They have dug canals, cultivated fields, sailed across lagoons and bays, fished in shallow waters and transformed an apparently inhospitable wetland into their home. Few things explain this relationship better than rice.
Today, it is almost impossible to imagine the Delta de l'Ebre without its rice fields. They shape its landscape and determine its colours throughout the year. There is the brown earth of winter, the mirror-like water of the flooded fields, the intense green of the growing plants and, finally, the golden tones that announce the harvest.
Rice cultivation expanded especially from the nineteenth century onwards, when irrigation canals made it possible to bring water from the Ebre across large areas of the Delta. What had once been marshland could gradually be transformed into agricultural land. It was not an easy transformation. Working in the rice fields meant long days in water and mud, under the sun, surrounded by mosquitoes and exposed to diseases that once made life in the wetlands particularly difficult. Generations of farmers shaped this landscape through enormous physical effort. The result was more than a crop.
Rice became part of the identity of the Delta. The calendar of the fields became the calendar of its people: preparing the soil, flooding the land, sowing, watching the rice grow and finally harvesting it. Agriculture created a rhythm that was repeated year after year and connected families to the same fields across generations.
Even today, when machines have replaced much of the hardest manual labour, rice remains one of the clearest symbols of the relationship between the people of the Delta and their land.
But the Delta cannot be understood only through agriculture. It must also be understood through fishing. The Mediterranean, the river, the lagoons and the two great bays -the Badia del Fangar and the Badia dels Alfacs- have provided food and livelihoods for centuries.
Fishing here has traditionally required an intimate knowledge of water: its depth, temperature and salinity; the winds; the seasons; the movements of fish; and the subtle changes that announce whether the sea will be generous or difficult. els, mullet and other fish have long formed part of local fishing traditions, while the sheltered waters of the bays have also become closely associated with shellfish cultivation, particularly mussels and oysters.
At places such as Sant Carles de la Ràpita, l'Ampolla or Deltebre, the relationship with water is visible everywhere. Boats, ports, fishing gear, markets and kitchens all tell the same story: here, the sea and the river are not simply part of the landscape. They are part of everyday life. And inevitably, what people harvest from the fields and obtain from the water eventually meets on the table.
Rice, fish and shellfish have created a cuisine that is inseparable from the territory: arròs a banda, arròs negre, eel dishes, mussels, oysters and many other recipes born not from luxury, but from proximity and necessity. They are dishes that taste of landscape.
Perhaps this is what makes the Delta de l'Ebre so fascinating. People did not simply settle on this land. They had to learn it. They learnt where water could be controlled and where it could not. They learnt how to cultivate soil that had once been marsh. They learnt when to fish and when to remain ashore. They learnt to read winds, currents, seasons and the river itself.
The Delta demanded adaptation, patience and resilience. And in return, it created a distinctive way of life. For outsiders, a rice field may simply be a beautiful landscape reflected in water. A fishing boat crossing a lagoon at sunset may look picturesque. But behind those images there are generations of knowledge, labour and memory.
The landscape exists because nature created the possibility and human beings learnt how to inhabit it. Perhaps that is why the Delta de l'Ebre cannot be described simply as land or simply as water. It is both. It is river and sea, mud and salt, rice and fish, farmers and fishermen. Above all, it is a place where people have spent generations learning one essential lesson: you do not conquer water. You learn how to live with it.
Today, The Grandma has received the first of the two The X-Files Lego sets she had ordered. She is very happy.
To celebrate it, she has invited Claire Fontaine to build some other The X-Files block figures she had been meaning to put together: Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, the Lone Gunmen (Melvin Frohike, John Fitzgerald Byers, and Richard 'Ringo' Langly), the Cigarette-Smoking Man, Eugene Tooms, the Grey Alien, and the Flukeman.
They have enjoyed a very entertaining morning reminiscing about the characters from one of the best TV series ever aired because thirty years have passed in moments, and The X-Files has become one of them.
There are television series that we watch, enjoy and eventually leave behind. And then there are those rare stories that somehow become part of us. The X-Files belongs to the second group.
More than thirty years after Fox Mulder and Dana Scully first entered that basement office at the FBI, the series remains instantly recognisable. A flashlight cutting through the darkness, an unexplained light in the sky, a poster hanging on a wall, two people walking into the unknown.
And three sentences:
The Truth Is Out There.
I Want to Believe.
Trust No One.
Perhaps the extraordinary longevity of The X-Files can be explained through those three ideas. Because underneath the aliens, monsters, conspiracies and paranormal phenomena, the series was always asking questions that had very little to do with extraterrestrial life. What can we know? Whom can we trust? And what happens when we desperately want something to be true?
The greatest idea behind The X-Files was not the paranormal. It was Mulder and Scully. Fox Mulder wants to believe. Dana Scully wants to understand. At first sight, they appear to represent two opposite ways of looking at reality. Mulder is intuition, possibility and belief. Scully is science, evidence and rationality. But the series gradually makes this distinction much more complicated.
Mulder is not simply a believer. He searches obsessively for evidence because belief alone is not enough for him. Scully, meanwhile, is not simply a sceptic. She is a scientist, but also a woman of faith. She demands proof from Mulder while accepting that some of the deepest questions of human existence cannot necessarily be answered in a laboratory. That contradiction makes them fascinating. Neither of them possesses the whole truth. And perhaps that is the first great philosophical lesson of The X-Files: truth may require us to look at the world through more than one pair of eyes.
Mulder needs Scully because belief without criticism can become credulity. Scully needs Mulder because scepticism without imagination can prevent us from seeing possibilities beyond what we already know. They do not cancel each other out. They complete each other.
Few television slogans have become as culturally recognisable as The Truth Is Out There. But it is a strangely unsettling sentence. It does not say that the truth will be found. It merely says that it exists. Throughout The X-Files, Mulder and Scully repeatedly approach the truth only to watch it disappear again. Evidence is destroyed. Witnesses vanish. Memories are unreliable. Governments conceal information. Powerful people manipulate events. Even when our protagonists discover something extraordinary, proving it to everyone else is another matter entirely.
The truth is always somewhere ahead of them. This gives The X-Files an almost existential quality. The search itself becomes more important than the possibility of reaching a final answer. Mulder continues because he must. Scully continues because, despite all her doubts, she eventually understands that the search matters. Perhaps this is why the series never needed to solve every mystery. A completely explained X-Files universe would almost contradict its own philosophy. Mystery is not simply something waiting to be solved. Mystery is part of being human.
And then there is the poster. A flying saucer suspended above a landscape beneath four words: I WANT TO BELIEVE. Not I believe. That difference is everything. Mulder's famous poster does not express certainty. It expresses desire. Wanting to believe means admitting that doubt exists. It is one of the most beautiful contradictions in the entire series. Mulder, supposedly the believer, surrounds himself with uncertainty. He wants evidence. He wants confirmation. He wants to discover that his intuition about the universe is justified.
In that sense, The X-Files is not really a celebration of belief. It is a celebration of questioning. To believe and to doubt are not necessarily opposites. Sometimes they are travelling companions.
If I Want to Believe represents hope, Trust No One represents its darker counterpart. The X-Files appeared in the 1990s, but its suspicion of institutions, official explanations and manufactured truths has allowed it to remain culturally relevant far beyond that decade. Yet the series contains an interesting paradox. It tells us to trust no one while simultaneously building one of television's most enduring relationships entirely around trust.
Mulder trusts Scully. Scully trusts Mulder.
Again and again, the institutions surrounding them fail. Authorities lie. Evidence disappears. Informants deceive them. Allies become enemies and enemies occasionally tell the truth. But when almost everything else becomes uncertain, Mulder and Scully continue to have each other. Perhaps, then, the real message was never simply Trust No One. Perhaps it was: be careful about whom you trust, and understand how precious genuine trust becomes in a world filled with uncertainty.
Why did The X-Files become a cult series? A cult series cannot simply be manufactured. Popularity can be manufactured. Marketing can create a phenomenon. Audiences can make a programme successful. But cult status requires something else: people must continue carrying the story with them after the screen goes dark. The X-Files gave its audience a language.
The truth is out there.
I want to believe.
Trust no one.
It gave us symbols: the basement office, the UFO poster, flashlights, mysterious forests, black oil, government corridors and an unmarked cigarette held between the fingers of a shadowy man. It even gave us a letter.
X.
But above all, it invited viewers to participate. Every episode asked us to decide what we believed. Mulder sees something impossible. Scully searches for a rational explanation. And somewhere between them sits the viewer. That space between certainty and doubt is where The X-Files lives.
And this is where The Grandma's little LEGO figures enter the story. At first, LEGO and The X-Files might seem to belong to completely different worlds. One is a construction toy. The other is a television series filled with darkness, conspiracy and things that definitely do not belong underneath children's beds. Yet they share something important. Neither remained confined to its original purpose.
LEGO stopped being merely a children's toy. For millions of adults, those little bricks became creativity, design, nostalgia, collecting and memory. The X-Files stopped being merely a television programme. It became imagery, quotations, mythology and a particular way of looking at the unknown. That is what cultural icons do. They escape from the object that originally contained them.
A LEGO brick is still a LEGO brick. A television episode is still a television episode.
But when something becomes part of our personal history, its meaning changes. We are no longer simply playing with it or watching it. We are remembering through it.
Perhaps that is why building these little figures has been such a pleasure. They are not simply assembling pieces of plastic. They are rebuilding memories. Memories of watching Mulder and Scully walk through dark corridors with their flashlights. Of hearing Mark Snow's unmistakable theme. Of waiting for the opening titles and those famous words to appear on the screen. Memories of wondering whether Mulder was right. Memories of being convinced that Scully was right. And memories of discovering, eventually, that perhaps neither question mattered as much as I thought. Because the magic was in watching them search together.
There is something wonderfully appropriate about reconstructing a cult television series using another cultural icon such as LEGO.
Brick after brick. Memory after memory. Mystery after mystery.
More than thirty years later, we have smartphones, artificial intelligence, telescopes capable of looking extraordinarily deep into the universe and access to more information than Mulder could ever have stored in his basement office. And yet the fundamental questions remain surprisingly familiar.
What is true? What do we believe? Whom do we trust?
Perhaps that is the ultimate reason why The X-Files became a cult series. The monsters belonged to the 1990s. The questions belong to everyone. And somewhere, on a tiny LEGO desk in a tiny LEGO basement office, I like to imagine there is still a tiny poster hanging on the wall. A UFO. A landscape. And four words that have never really left us: I WANT TO BELIEVE.
There are architects whose work belongs to museums, guidebooks and histories of art. And there are architects whose work becomes inseparable from a place. Josep Maria Jujoli Gibert belongs to both categories.
His name inevitably appears beside that of Antoni Gaudí. His imagination can be found in some of the most celebrated creations of Catalan Modernisme. At Park Güell, Casa Batlló and La Pedrera, Jujol's extraordinary ability with colour, materials, surfaces and decorative invention contributed to works that millions of people now associate almost instinctively with Gaudí.
But perhaps there is another way to understand Jujol. Leave Barcelona. Follow the Llobregat. And stop at Sant Joan Despí. Here, Jujol was not simply the collaborator of a famous architect. Here, he became part of a town.
It is difficult to imagine Sant Joan Despí at the beginning of the twentieth century if we only know the town today. Modern Sant Joan Despí belongs completely to the Barcelona metropolitan landscape. Roads, railway lines, apartment blocks, industries and services connect it to the enormous urban organism surrounding the Catalan capital.
It is known throughout Catalunya as the home of TV3, the Catalan public television broadcaster. Football supporters associate it with FC Barcelona's Ciutat Esportiva Joan Gamper.
For decades, industry has also formed part of its identity. But the Sant Joan Despí that Jujol encountered was very different. It was still essentially agricultural. Fields surrounded a relatively small settlement. Wheat, maize, vegetables, hemp and vines had traditionally been cultivated there. At the beginning of the twentieth century, industry was still remarkably limited. This was the landscape into which Jujol introduced his imagination. And that matters. Because Jujol did not impose an urban architecture upon a rural world. He listened to the place.
Jujol's relationship with Sant Joan Despí began in 1913 with the Torre de la Creu, commissioned by Josefa Romeu. Imagine its appearance then. Not surrounded by the dense metropolitan city we know today, but emerging within an agricultural landscape. Five intersecting cylinders. Curved roofs. Colour. Ceramic surfaces. An architecture apparently determined to ignore the straight line whenever imagination offered a more interesting alternative. The building must have seemed extraordinary. But Jujol did not treat rural Sant Joan Despí as an empty stage upon which an architect could display his genius.
The relationship gradually became deeper. He met local families. He received further commissions. He worked with local craftsmen. He transformed existing buildings. He designed new ones. Eventually, he worked for the Town Council itself. During the last decades of his life, Sant Joan Despí was no longer simply somewhere Jujol happened to have projects. It was one of his places.
Perhaps nothing explains Jujol's relationship with Sant Joan Despí better than Can Negre. The building already existed. It was a seventeenth-century farmhouse. Another architect might have regarded the old structure as an obstacle to modernity. Jujol did something much more interesting. He transformed it. He preserved and reinvented. Traditional materials and techniques coexist with extraordinary forms, religious symbolism, colour, wrought iron, plaster, wood, ceramics and that astonishing carriage-shaped gallery dominating the façade. The old farmhouse does not disappear beneath Modernisme. It becomes something else while remaining recognisable. And perhaps this tells us something important about Jujol himself. His creativity did not necessarily require a blank page. He could begin with what was already there. A wall. A farmhouse. A discarded material. A landscape. An imperfection. For Jujol, limitations were frequently invitations to imagine.
By the 1920s, Jujol's relationship with Sant Joan Despí had become institutional as well as artistic. He was producing reports for the Town Council and in 1926 became its auxiliary municipal architect. His association with the municipality would continue through the final decades of his life. This changes the way we should look at his legacy there. Jujol was not merely designing beautiful houses for individual clients. He was thinking about the town itself. Streets. Connections. Buildings. Public space. Growth. How should an agricultural village become something larger without losing the logic of its landscape? That question became particularly visible in one fascinating project.
During the first decades of the twentieth century, landowners began considering the development of the Samontà area, above the railway. Pere Negre entrusted Jujol with an urbanisation project. For years, Jujol studied the land. His proposals attempted to follow existing paths, property boundaries and natural changes in elevation rather than simply drawing an abstract geometric grid over the countryside. The plan was formally presented in 1926. It was never built. And here history becomes fascinating. Because the land did not remain agricultural forever. The future arrived -simply not the future Jujol had drawn.
After the middle of the twentieth century, Sant Joan Despí began changing dramatically. The 1953 regional plan designated land for industrial development outside Barcelona. The area that Jujol had once imagined being urbanised would eventually form part of the Fontsanta industrial zone.
Gallina Blanca was among the first major companies to establish itself there. Others followed. Factories replaced fields. Employment attracted new inhabitants, including many families arriving from other parts of the State. New neighbourhoods developed to accommodate a rapidly increasing population. Sant Joan Despí was becoming industrial. The transformation was not unique. Similar processes were changing the entire Baix Llobregat and much of metropolitan Barcelona. Agricultural land became industrial land. Villages became towns. Paths became streets. Farmhouses found themselves surrounded by apartment buildings. A landscape that had developed over centuries changed within a few decades. And Jujol's buildings remained.
This is perhaps where Jujol's importance to Sant Joan Despí becomes greater than architecture itself. His buildings became witnesses. The Torre de la Creu remembers a Sant Joan Despí in which an eccentric summer house could suddenly appear beside fields. Can Negre remembers the agricultural world of the Catalan masia while simultaneously transforming it into something fantastical.
Casa Rovira still carries decoration inspired by fields and fruit. Even Jujol's unrealised urban plans preserve evidence of a moment when the future of Sant Joan Despí had not yet been decided. Buildings can do this. They store time. Not metaphorically, but physically. A wall may survive after the field beside it disappears. A farmhouse may remain after agriculture ceases to define the local economy. An architect may die while the town continues changing around his work. Architecture becomes a form of memory that cannot easily be erased. The transformation continued.
The industrial town gradually became part of the contemporary metropolitan city. Today, someone hearing the name Sant Joan Despí may think of very different things. TV3. The Ciutat Esportiva Joan Gamper. FC Barcelona players arriving for training. The Fontsanta industrial area. The railway. The tram. Schools, hospitals, businesses and residential neighbourhoods. Almost none of these things belongs to Jujol's Sant Joan Despí. And yet Jujol still belongs to theirs. That is the fascinating paradox. The town changed almost beyond recognition, but the architect became one of the threads connecting its different identities. Agricultural Sant Joan Despí. Modernista Sant Joan Despí. Industrial Sant Joan Despí. Metropolitan Sant Joan Despí. They coexist in the same streets.
There is another reason Sant Joan Despí matters. It allows us to see Jujol without constantly looking over his shoulder for Gaudí. This is important. Jujol's collaborations with Gaudí were extraordinary. His contribution to works such as Park Güell, Casa Batlló and La Pedrera forms an essential part of his legacy. But collaboration can sometimes cast a long shadow. The enormous international fame of Gaudí has inevitably caused many visitors to encounter Jujol first as Gaudí's collaborator. Sant Joan Despí reverses the relationship. Here we encounter Jujol as Jujol. Architect. Designer. Painter. Craftsman. Urban planner. Municipal architect. Neighbour. Here his imagination does not occupy one corner of somebody else's masterpiece. It occupies the town.
There is something else particularly appropriate about Jujol working in an agricultural town. He possessed an extraordinary ability to see possibilities in modest things. Fragments. Ceramics. Iron. Wood. Plaster. Objects and materials that other people might overlook. Today we might instinctively associate this with recycling, but Jujol's attitude was more profound than simply reusing materials. He appeared capable of recognising beauty before beauty was obvious. A broken piece was not necessarily waste. An irregularity did not necessarily require correction. An old building did not necessarily need demolition. A humble material did not need to pretend to be expensive. Transformation could begin with what already existed. Perhaps this is why his architecture feels so organic. It does not merely imitate nature. It behaves a little like nature. It adapts. It incorporates. It transforms.
Cities often preserve individual monuments while destroying the relationship that once existed between those monuments and their surroundings. Sant Joan Despí offers something more interesting. Jujol has become part of its identity.
Can Negre is now a cultural centre devoted to his legacy. His works form an architectural route through the town. His name remains attached not simply to individual buildings but to the cultural understanding of Sant Joan Despí itself. The agricultural village disappeared. The industrial town changed. The metropolitan city continues evolving. But Jujol remains. And perhaps that is the most beautiful way to understand the relationship between an architect and a place. Not as ownership. Not even as influence. But as conversation. Jujol listened to Sant Joan Despí when it was still surrounded by fields. Sant Joan Despí gave him somewhere to experiment, build, transform and imagine. Then history transformed the town in ways neither could have predicted. Factories arrived. Population grew. Fields disappeared. Television studios appeared. Footballers began training nearby. And through all those changes, Jujol's strange curves, colours, inscriptions, ironwork and fragments remained.
Today, walking through Sant Joan Despí means walking through several towns simultaneously. The agricultural town. The Modernista town. The industrial town. The metropolitan town. And somewhere between them all stands Josep Maria Jujol. Not simply as the architect who built in Sant Joan Despí. But as the architect whom Sant Joan Despí made part of itself.
There is another reason why Sant Joan Despí has always been much more than a place on a map to The Grandma. Part of her family lives there. Her uncle worked at Gallina Blanca, one of those factories that transformed the old agricultural town into an industrial one. He and her father even played football for the company's team.
And football would eventually become part of her own Sant Joan Despí, too. As a teenager, she played for La Llevantina, later, the club also known as Llevant-Les Planes. At a time when being a girl who wanted to play football was not always easy, she found there something extraordinarily simple that should never have been extraordinary at all: the possibility of playing.
She played in a mixed team. She was not asking to make history. She was not trying to prove anything. She was an adolescent who loved football and wanted to enjoy it under the same conditions as her teammates. Eventually, the team became boys-only. And that was the end of her football career. Life continued. But so did football.
La Llevantina eventually became Llevant-Les Planes, a club with an important place in the history of Catalan women's football. The landscape changed too. FC Barcelona built its Ciutat Esportiva in Sant Joan Despí, and beside it came the Johan Cruyff Stadium.
More than thirty years after playing on those dusty pitches, she found herself returning to almost the same territory to watch professional women's football. Sometimes history has a strange sense of geography. The girl who had once been allowed to play only until the team became exclusively male could now sit in a stadium built specifically to host, among others, one of the greatest women's football teams in the world. She would love to say that the circle has been completed. It has not.
Women's football has changed enormously, but equality is not a destination we have completely reached. There is still work to do. And perhaps that makes the journey even more meaningful. Whenever she return to Sant Joan Despí, she still remember those old dirt football pitches. She fell and left part of her knees behind. She arrived home covered in dust, scratches and what she proudly considered her battle wounds. And she was happy. Terribly happy.
Because sometimes the places that remain most deeply inside us are not the beautiful ones. They are the places where we were allowed to become ourselves. Jujol's Sant Joan Despí was a landscape of fields. Her uncle's was a landscape of factories. Hers was a landscape of dirt football pitches. Today's Sant Joan Despí has television studios, the Ciutat Esportiva and the Johan Cruyff Stadium. Different landscapes. Different generations. Different stories. And yet something remains. Jujol's buildings remain. Memory remains. And, wonderfully, so do the friends with whom she shared those football pitches all those years ago.
Perhaps places are a little like people. They change enormously and somehow remain themselves.
Today marks 147 years since the birth of Josep Maria Jujol i Gibert. Let us enjoy his legacy.
Today, The Grandma has been doing one of the things she likes best: reading comics, and she has chosen one of the Marvel heroes -Captain America.
There is something wonderfully contradictory about Captain America. He wears the flag of the United States on his body. His shield carries its colours. Even his name seems to transform an entire country into a superhero. And yet Captain America has endured for more than eighty years because, at his best, he is not really a story about a country. He is a story about an ideal.
Steve Rogers is not interesting because he is strong. He is interesting because of what he believed before he became strong. That distinction contains almost everything we need to understand Captain America.
Joe Simon and Jack Kirby created Captain America in 1940, and the first issue appeared at the end of that year with a March 1941 cover date. The famous cover showed Captain America punching Adolf Hitler. That image was not politically neutral.
The United States had not yet entered the Second World War. Simon and Kirby, both from Jewish families, created their hero while Nazi Germany was devastating Europe and antisemitic persecution was escalating. Simon later recalled that Hitler seemed like the obvious villain because he was, in his words, a maniac. The creators received threatening letters after publication, while New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia reportedly reassured them that they would be protected.
Captain America was therefore political before he was commercial mythology. His first enemy was not an imaginary monster. It was fascism. But Simon and Kirby made another decision that would ultimately prove even more important than the costume. Their hero begins as a physically weak young man.
Steve Rogers wants to fight, but his body prevents him from doing so. What makes him worthy of becoming Captain America is therefore not physical superiority. It is his character. The serum does not create the hero. It gives the hero the physical ability to act upon values he already possessed. That is the foundation of Captain America's moral identity.
Superhero stories frequently ask what a person would do if suddenly given extraordinary power. Captain America asks a slightly different question: Who should be given power?
Steve Rogers is significant because strength arrives after morality. Before the muscles, before the shield and before the uniform, there is a young man who cannot tolerate seeing others abused. That reverses the traditional logic of power. Steve does not defend vulnerable people because he is powerful. He becomes powerful because he already wanted to defend vulnerable people. This distinction explains why Captain America would be a fundamentally different character if Steve Rogers were merely a perfect soldier. He is not. He doubts. He questions. He disagrees. And throughout his long publication history, writers have repeatedly confronted him with conflicts between authority and conscience.
Captain America can obey an order. Steve Rogers must decide whether the order deserves to be obeyed.
This is where Captain America becomes much more complicated than his costume suggests. The easiest interpretation of the character is that he represents America. A more interesting interpretation is that he represents what America says it wants to be. Freedom. Equality. Justice. Democracy. Human dignity. The difference matters enormously. Governments make decisions. Institutions fail. Political leaders change. Nations contradict their own principles. An ideal can be used to judge all of them.
Consequently, Captain America's loyalty has often been portrayed not simply as loyalty to authority but as loyalty to principles. At different moments in the comics, Steve Rogers has questioned institutions, abandoned the Captain America identity and confronted people exercising legitimate power when he believed their actions contradicted those principles. That does not make him less patriotic within the logic of the character. It asks what patriotism means. Is loving your country the same thing as believing that your country is always right? Or can love of country include demanding that it live up to its own ideals?
Captain America has repeatedly provided Marvel writers with a character through whom to explore that tension. There is also something beautifully symbolic about Captain America's most recognisable object. A shield. Not a sword. Not a gun. A shield. Of course, he uses it offensively too. Comics require considerably more action than philosophical essays. But symbolically the choice is remarkable. A shield exists primarily to protect. It places Captain America's power within an ethical framework: strength should stand between the aggressor and the vulnerable. That may be one reason the shield has become one of the most instantly recognisable objects in popular culture. It tells us what the character is supposed to do before he says a word. Protect.
Then there is another essential dimension of Steve Rogers: he does not entirely belong to the world in which he lives. The famous "man out of time" concept transformed Captain America from a wartime superhero into something psychologically richer. Steve carries one world inside him while living in another. People he knew have disappeared. Social values have changed. The country he remembers has changed. Even the meaning of his own uniform has changed. This gives the character a permanent melancholy.
Captain America can therefore embody something surprisingly universal: the experience of discovering that time has moved on without us. Most of us will never wake after decades frozen in ice. But almost everyone eventually looks at the world and thinks: When did everything change? A street disappears. A familiar building is demolished. Technology transforms everyday life. People we loved are no longer there. Words change their meanings. Customs vanish.
New generations inhabit a world that seems perfectly normal to them and slightly strange to us. Steve Rogers exaggerates that experience until it becomes mythology. He is permanently negotiating between memory and the present. And importantly, his challenge is not simply to preserve the past. It is to decide which values deserve to survive it.
Captain America also offers an unusual model of masculinity. Steve Rogers is physically extraordinary, but physical domination is not supposed to be his moral centre. His defining qualities are usually loyalty, courage, empathy, perseverance and responsibility. He knows what weakness feels like because he has experienced it. That memory matters. The skinny Steve Rogers remains psychologically inside Captain America. Without him, the muscles mean very little. Perhaps this is one of the character's most enduring messages: never forget who you were when you had no power. Because power reveals something about character. Someone who remembers vulnerability may use strength to protect. Someone who despises vulnerability may use strength to dominate.
Captain America is built around that difference. Why has Captain America survived? Many superheroes created during the Golden Age of comics disappeared. Captain America did not. Part of the explanation is obviously cultural and commercial. Marvel reinvented him for new generations; generations of writers and artists reinterpreted him; television, animation and especially cinema dramatically expanded his audience. But longevity alone cannot explain affection. Captain America survives because the central conflict within the character can never really be resolved. What should we do when reality fails to live up to our ideals? Every generation can ask that question. The historical circumstances change. The enemies change. The politics change. The meaning of America itself changes. But the tension remains.
Captain America therefore functions almost like a mirror. Different periods of American history have looked at Steve Rogers and asked different questions through him. What is patriotism? When should authority be questioned? What responsibility accompanies power? Can principles survive political disappointment? What does a good person do inside an imperfect system? Those questions are much larger than superhero comics.
Perhaps this explains why Captain America has become so deeply embedded in popular culture. Steve Rogers does not need to represent what Americans are. He can represent what a society hopes it might become. And there is an enormous difference between those ideas. The first would turn Captain America into propaganda. The second allows him to become criticism. If America automatically embodied everything Captain America represents, there would be very little reason for Captain America to exist. The character becomes interesting precisely when reality and ideal separate. Then Steve has to choose. And the best Captain America stories understand that the choice cannot simply be: My country, right or wrong. It must be more difficult: What are the principles that made this country worth defending in the first place? Why we still need Steve Rogers Perhaps that is ultimately why Captain America has travelled so successfully beyond the country whose name he carries.
You do not need to be American to understand Steve Rogers. You only need to understand what it means to believe that strength creates responsibility. To know that legality and morality are not always identical. To believe that vulnerable people deserve protection. To understand that institutions should serve principles rather than replace them. And to recognise that courage sometimes means standing alone. The costume is American. The question underneath it is universal.
What do you do when you finally have the power to change something? Steve Rogers had already answered that question when he was still a skinny young man from Brooklyn. The serum only made everyone else notice. And perhaps that is Captain America's greatest message. A hero is not someone who becomes good when given power. A hero is someone we can trust with power because they were already good without it.
Claire Fontaine and The Grandma share many interests -among them, a love of literature- and if there is one author they both consider pivotal, it is Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Claire is a linguistic prodigy and an accomplished polyglot; today, she has decided to reread Syv ungdomsfortellinger -a Norwegian version of a collection of seven stories: En annens hustru og Ektemannen under sengen (Another Man's Wife and a Husband Under the Bed), Jul og bryllup (A Christmas Tree and a Wedding), Polzunkov, Herr Prokhartsjin (Mr Prokharchin), Roman i ni brev (A Novel in Nine Letters) and En ærlig tyv (An Honest Thief), that explores themes central to Dostoevsky's psychology, such as the solitude of the soul.
We are living through turbulent times (though when have they not been?), and looking back to seek out great literary touchstones is an exercise in both social responsibility and spiritual peace.
There are writers who describe human behaviour, and there are writers who seem to enter the hidden rooms in which that behaviour is born. Fyodor Dostoevsky belongs unmistakably to the second group.
In Syv ungdomsfortellinger, what matters is not so much what happens as what happens inside a human being. The external events are often modest, sometimes almost insignificant. A meeting, a conversation, a disappointment, a moment of embarrassment, an unexpected gesture of kindness may be enough to open an entire psychological universe.
Dostoevsky understood something extraordinarily modern: human beings do not experience reality objectively. We experience it through our wounds, our expectations, our fears, our memories and, above all, through the image we have constructed of ourselves.
That is why his characters can suffer enormously from apparently small events. A word can become an insult. A silence can become rejection. A glance can destroy an illusion. And a simple act of compassion can suddenly restore someone's sense of dignity. The battlefield is not the street. It is the mind and the terrible need to be seen.
One of the strongest psychological forces in these early tales is the need for recognition. Dostoevsky's lonely characters do not merely want company. They want someone to confirm their existence. They want to be noticed, understood and accepted. This distinction is essential.
Loneliness in Dostoevsky is rarely just physical isolation. It is the much deeper experience of feeling that one's inner life has no witness. A person may walk through crowded streets, live among thousands of people and still experience profound loneliness. The tragedy begins when the individual starts creating an imaginary world to compensate for what reality refuses to provide. Fantasy then becomes both refuge and prison. It protects the dreamer from disappointment, but it also makes genuine contact with other people increasingly difficult. The imagined world is safer because it can be controlled. Real human beings cannot. They disappoint us. They misunderstand us. They leave. And yet they are precisely what we need. This contradiction lies at the heart of Dostoevsky's psychological universe: we are wounded by other people, but we cannot become fully human without them.
Dostoevsky writes about humiliation as a psychological wound. Few writers have understood humiliation as deeply as him. Poverty in these tales is therefore more than an economic condition. It becomes psychological. To lack money may also mean having to ask, wait, depend, apologise, endure contempt or become conscious of one's clothes, one's home, one's position and one's apparent insignificance in the eyes of others. Material inequality slowly becomes emotional inequality. This is one of Dostoevsky's most powerful social insights. A society does not only distribute wealth unequally. It can also distribute dignity unequally. Those at the margins gradually learn how society sees them. Eventually, that external judgement can become an internal voice. The poor man begins to feel ashamed of being poor. The rejected person begins to believe that rejection proves something about their worth. The lonely person begins to suspect that perhaps they deserve loneliness. Social violence has completed its work when the victim starts carrying it inside.
Dostoevsky also understood that humiliation does not necessarily produce humility. Sometimes it produces pride and it is the armour of the vulnerable. His vulnerable characters can be extraordinarily proud precisely because their dignity is constantly threatened. Pride becomes armour: a desperate attempt to protect the last territory over which they still have control -their own sense of self. This explains one of the great paradoxes of Dostoevsky's psychology
A person may desperately need help and simultaneously reject it. They may long for affection and behave in ways that make affection impossible. They may desire understanding while hiding behind sarcasm, fantasy, silence or resentment. From the outside, such behaviour may appear irrational. From the inside, it makes perfect psychological sense. To accept help can mean admitting vulnerability. To declare love means risking rejection. To trust another person means giving them the power to hurt us. The wounded individual therefore develops strategies of self-protection. Unfortunately, those strategies often create exactly the suffering they were designed to prevent.
The dreamer is one of Dostoevsky's most fascinating human types. Dreaming is not presented simply as imagination or romantic sensitivity. It can become a psychological strategy for surviving an unsatisfactory reality. The dreamer constructs possibilities. Imaginary friendships. Imaginary conversations. Imaginary futures. In those fantasies, the self can finally become everything reality has denied it: loved, admired, courageous, important. But there is a price. The more perfect the imagined world becomes, the more disappointing reality appears. Dostoevsky therefore asks a disturbing question: Can imagination save us from loneliness without eventually deepening it? There is no easy answer.
Imagination gives meaning to existence. Without dreams, human life would be unbearably narrow. But when dreaming replaces living, imagination becomes another form of isolation. The dreamer is simultaneously rich and poor: rich in inner experience, poor in shared experience.
Another remarkably modern element in Dostoevsky is his understanding of self-deception. His characters frequently believe that they understand their own motives. They do not. They rationalise jealousy as justice, fear as prudence, pride as dignity and obsession as love. This is perhaps one reason Dostoevsky still feels psychologically contemporary. Long before modern psychology gave us a vocabulary for defence mechanisms, projection or rationalisati on, he was dramatizing something fundamental: the human mind protects itself by rewriting its own motives.
We tell ourselves stories about who we are. We are generous. We are victims. We are misunderstood. We are morally superior. We are acting rationally. And then reality interrupts the story. At those moments, Dostoevsky's characters often discover that the person they imagined themselves to be and the person revealed by their actions are not quite the same. That discovery can be painful. But it can also be the beginning of moral awareness.
Dostoevsky's compassion is powerful precisely because it is not sentimental. He does not suggest that suffering automatically makes people virtuous. People who suffer can become generous, but they can also become bitter. They can love and manipulate, forgive and resent, sacrifice themselves and hurt others. The wounded person is still morally complicated. This matters enormously. True compassion does not require idealising another human being. We can recognise someone's contradictions and still understand their suffering. Perhaps this is one of the deepest ethical lessons of these tales. Understanding is not the same as excusing. But judgement without understanding is incomplete.
Dostoevsky is often described as a psychological writer, but his psychology cannot really be separated from society. His characters do not suffer in a vacuum. They inhabit a world structured by money, status, gender, reputation, employment and social expectations. Their anxieties are personal, but the forces producing those anxieties are often social. This is where Dostoevsky becomes more than an observer of individual psychology. He shows how society enters consciousness. Poverty becomes shame. Hierarchy becomes inferiority. Rejection becomes self-hatred. Isolation becomes fantasy. Powerlessness becomes resentment. The external world becomes an internal voice. And once that happens, oppression no longer needs to remain outside the individual. A person may begin policing, humiliating and punishing themselves. That is an extraordinarily powerful idea for a nineteenth-century writer -and an unsettlingly familiar one today.
Yet Dostoevsky does not leave us entirely in darkness. Against humiliation, isolation and despair, he repeatedly places something apparently fragile: human connection. Not grand heroism. Not abstract ideology. A conversation. A moment of recognition. Someone listening. Someone refusing to humiliate another person. Someone treating an apparently insignificant human being as significant. These gestures matter because Dostoevsky understands dignity relationally. We discover something about our own humanity through the way other people respond to us. Cruelty can therefore destroy far more than a moment. But kindness can also restore far more than a moment. Sometimes being genuinely seen by another person is enough to interrupt an entire narrative of worthlessness.
The word youth in Syv ungdomsfortellinger can also be read beyond biological age. Youth is the period in which the self is still unstable. Who am I? How do others see me? Am I worthy of love? What will become of me? What happens when reality refuses to resemble my dreams? These questions do not disappear when we grow older. Perhaps that is why these stories remain so recognisable. We carry versions of our younger selves throughout our lives: the person who wanted to belong, the person who feared ridicule, the person who imagined another future, the person who desperately wanted someone to say: I see you. Dostoevsky understood that much of adulthood consists of negotiating with those earlier selves.
The greatness of Dostoevsky does not lie in providing psychological answers. It lies in asking questions from which we cannot easily escape. How much of our personality is genuine, and how much is defence? How often does pride hide fear? How often does resentment hide humiliation? How much of what we call love is actually a desire to be recognised? How many of our convictions are stories we tell ourselves in order to survive? And what happens to a human being when society repeatedly tells them that they do not matter? Dostoevsky does not observe these questions from a comfortable distance. He places us inside them. That is why reading him can sometimes feel uncomfortable. We recognise behaviours we would prefer to attribute only to fictional characters. The jealousy. The fantasy. The self-pity. The need for approval. The wounded pride. The absurd internal conversations. The desperate desire to be understood. Dostoevsky's characters may belong to nineteenth-century Russia, but their minds do not. They belong to us.
Perhaps the most important social message running through these tales is that no human life is psychologically insignificant. Society creates categories: successful and unsuccessful, respectable and ridiculous, powerful and powerless, visible and invisible. Dostoevsky enters the lives of those who might otherwise remain invisible and reveals the extraordinary complexity hidden behind an ordinary face. The person passing unnoticed in the street contains memories, fears, fantasies, humiliations, hopes and entire imaginary worlds. That person is not a secondary character in their own existence. Nobody is. And perhaps this is the quiet revolution at the centre of Dostoevsky's early fiction. To look seriously at another human being is already an ethical act.
Across Syv ungdomsfortellinger, different characters, circumstances and emotions eventually seem to converge on the same fundamental question: What does a human being need in order to feel human? Money matters. Security matters. Social position matters. But beneath them lies something even more fundamental: dignity, recognition and connection. We need to know that someone can see us without reducing us to our poverty, our mistakes, our social position or our failures.
Dostoevsky understood the terrible consequences of a society that denies people that recognition. But he also understood the extraordinary power contained in the opposite gesture. To listen. To recognise. To show compassion. To refuse humiliation. To see the person whom everyone else has decided not to see. Perhaps that is why these youthful tales still feel so alive.
Dostoevsky was writing about nineteenth-century Russia. But he had already discovered something timeless: the deepest human battles are often invisible, and sometimes the smallest act of recognition can prevent another human being from disappearing inside them.
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