"On a beach next to the border, hundreds of people who had crossed over gathered under the scorching sun."

"But Soufiane ez Znafry, 26, said that many were turning back because they were hungry. 'We have not eaten in two days,' he said, adding that all the supermarkets in the area had closed and that his stomach was 'growling.' He had rushed from Tangier on Thursday after friends told him they were heading to Spain. He said he barely scrapes by in Morocco working as a sous-chef. In the rush, carrying only a bag containing some clothes and a few possessions, he did not tell his parents that he was leaving. 'I did not want to worry them,' he said...."

From "Live Updates: Tens of Thousands Crossed Into Spanish Territory, Officials Say/As many as 60,000 people were estimated to have surged from Morocco into Ceuta, creating a crisis for Spain’s pro-immigration government. At least 34 people died, officials said" (NYT gift link).

"Morante, born José Antonio Morante Camacho, is widely regarded as the leading 'torero de arte' of his generation, and deemed by some to be the greatest ever."

"Famed for his mastery of the cape and a style that blends risk, improvisation and aesthetic refinement, critics regularly attribute 'mysticism' to his best performances.... A recent El País commentary called one of his performances a 'virtuosic, stirring, surprising, baroque work — an act of improvisation by an artist who is not of this world, capable of hypnotising, with a supernatural ability entirely alien to modern bullfighting.' Another suggested it would not be surprising 'if a religion were founded in his honour.'..."

That's from The London Times., where it looks like this:

"Cecilia Giménez, famed for ‘Monkey Christ’ mural mishap, dies at 94."

The Guardian reports.

Amid the storm of mockery and bad publicity over what became known as the Monkey Christ, Giménez took to her bed with an attack of anxiety, losing 17kg (37lb) in the process. However, she soon found that notoriety had an upside as people began bidding to buy her own art, which she sold on eBay, and she later donated the proceeds to a Catholic charity. The botched restoration became first an internet sensation and then a tourist attraction and the church began charging for admission. Ryanair laid on special flights to Zaragoza, the nearest airport, and today thousands of people continue to visit the village to see her work....

They made an opera about it:

"Morante is a genius, a being born to make beauty dream; a revolutionary, a complete artist, pure feeling, brave, master of a prodigious technique and a dazzling capacity for inspiration."

Wrote Antonio Lorca, a bullfighting critic, quoted in a London Times article about Morante's sudden retirement, "Spain’s top matador bids farewell — with a snip of his scissors/After a dramatic final fight, the torero retires as bullfighting faces growing scrutiny and declining support among younger Spaniards."

Spain’s leading matador has stunned the bullfighting world by staging an unexpected farewell, symbolically cutting off his ponytail in the ring after a “historic” performance.... His departure marks the end of a unique career whose “classicism” and “mysticism” often exhausted critics’ superlatives....

Is it surprising that there is still bullfighting in Spain?

Look what they've done to the Virgin of the Macarena.

Here's the article, in the London Times.

Comments from the Brotherhood of the Macarena: “This isn’t her; this isn’t the Virgin of Seville. It’s sad. My heart is about to burst out... They should have left her as she was.” And: “I came to see her because everyone in my family has been crying all day about it.”

I know, you're thinking about that dance, the Macarena. Or are you thinking about the "Monkey Christ"?

"On Sunday morning, the activists met outside the Sagrada Família church (the city’s most popular tourist attraction), surrounded a tour bus filled with passengers..."

"... hung a banner announcing the June 15 demonstrations from its windshield, and squirted it with water guns. 'We don’t want to hurt anyone,' said Elena Boschi, an English-language teacher and activist from Genoa, Italy. 'We just want them to be mindful of the impact that their presence is having on these places and the people who live in them.'" 

I'm reading "European Anti-Tourism Groups Plan June 15 Disruptions/Driven by rising rents, crowds and what many see as neighborhood degradation, activists are calling to continue the kinds of protests that erupted last summer" (NYT)(free-access link).

You can't be squirting liquid at people. Your targets don't know that you don't mean harm. How do they know what liquid it is? But I get the message: People who are not making money through the tourist industry don't like their city crowded with tourists. The protesters do a good job of deterring the kind of tourists who, like me, don't want to bother the locals. 

"During the pandemic, we recovered the spaces and customs that tourism had forced us to abandon. You could have a coffee at a table..."

"... in front of the cathedral, or chat calmly with your neighbors on the street. There were even beautiful scenes like children bathing in the fountain in the Plaça Reial."

Said Daniel Pardo, 48, co-founder of the Assembly of Neighborhoods for Tourism Degrowth, quoted in "'The Demand Is Unstoppable': Can Barcelona Survive Mass Tourism? This summer, thousands of local protesters in the Spanish city denounced overtourism. With more crowds expected for the America’s Cup, we visited the areas where tensions are highest" (NYT).

"Tourism is a curse."

Tourism is a curse.
The place becomes unlivable. Real estate values rise but future generations priced out of the market. Convenience stores become luxury outlets. Natives move out, jet setters own empty apartments..

The planet is too small & everybody wants to go to Venice. pic.twitter.com/xFXyZVJmNb

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) July 7, 2024

Here's the article, "Barcelona residents protest against mass tourism/The city's rising cost of housing, up 68% in the past decade according to local authorities, is one of the main issues for the movement, along with the effects of tourism on local commerce and working conditions" (Le Monde).

Under the slogan "Enough! Let's put limits on tourism", some 2,800 people – according to police – marched along a waterfront district of Barcelona to demand a new economic model that would reduce the millions of tourists that visit every year.... The second most visited country after France, Spain received 85 million foreign visitors in 2023, an increase of 18.7% from the previous year, according to the National Statistics Institute. The most visited region was Catalonia, whose capital is Barcelona, with 18 million....

All you need is a high enough tourist tax, right? 

"A lot of pro-Palestine stuff in Barcelona."

Chris texts me from Spain, with 4 photographs:

In an alley next to the Palace Güell in Barcelona, Spain...

... my son Chris photographs that mural and this poster....

A closer look:

"Holy Week constitutes precisely the expression of a Christ away from the codes of male power."

"The Christ we love, before whom we prostrate ourselves and who is our example, does not look like an All Blacks rugby forward."

Said the columnist Chapu Apaolaza, quoted in "'Homoerotic Christ' on posters for Holy Week divides Spain/Artist defends painting used for Easter celebrations in Seville" (London Times).

From the artist, Salustiano García: "Those who see something dirty in the painting are only projecting their own internal dirt on to the image.... [They display] a lack of culture, of not knowing anything, of never having been in a museum or a church, because I haven’t invented any element that appears in the painting."

"I think British people don’t really care. They have, like, no standards. Like, they don’t really care about anything."

Said Bella Fisher, a British 21-year-old, vacationing in Spain, quoted in "A Summer Rite in Spain: Coping With the British Tourist Invasion/On the front lines of a low-cost resort, Spanish residents complain that U.K. visitors drink too much and don’t spend enough" (NYT).

"She had been a village beauty before marriage, noted for her skill at dancing the bolero and rattling the castanets..."

"... and she still retained her early propensities, spending the hard earnings of honest Peregil in frippery, and laying the very donkey under requisition for junketing parties into the country on Sundays, and saints’ days, and those innumerable holidays which are rather more numerous in Spain than the days of the week. With all this she was a little of a slattern, something more of a lie-abed, and, above all, a gossip of the first water; neglecting house, household, and everything else, to loiter slipshod in the houses of her gossip neighbors. He, however, who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, accommodates the yoke of matrimony to the submissive neck." 

Wrote Washington Irving in "The Alhambra" (Gutenberg).

I found that via the OED entry for "lie-abed," which means "One who lies late in bed; a late riser; a sluggard."

It's a propaganda postcard, but what is it propaganda for?

I found that at the subreddit Propaganda Posters.

"Twelve years after Javier Álvarez erected a billboard outside his winery featuring a painting of a woman, he received a threatening letter from the Ministry of Equality."

"The painting... presents a woman who is wearing a bikini gazing out to sea, her hands resting on her hips.... An official document from the ministry warned him: 'This way of using women’s bodies as an advertisement favours the perpetuation of discriminatory attitudes. Infringing Article 8 of the general law on advertising, which declares unlawful advertisements that present women in a degrading way by using their bodies as objects unrelated to the product they are trying to promote.'... His winery... replied to the warning... 'Whoever sees something sexual or sexist in that painting has a problem. It is an image of absolute innocence. The sun, the sea and a woman in a bikini stamped with hearts. She transmits the freshness that we wanted to radiate for our white wine.'... Sales of his wine bearing the image of a woman in a bikini have rocketed."

From "Spain orders bikini poster to be taken off pilgrimage route" (London Times).

The ministry, we're told, is run by Podemos, "a radical left-wing party."

Is the painting "an image of absolute innocence"? Here it is:

"Bob, he's a genius. He's like Picasso. He sees the angles and planes in what, for you, is ovoid."

I wrote, discussing Bob Dylan's analysis of "Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves." 

And then I saw something my son Chris sent me from across the sea, from the coast of Barcelona — a photo:

When is your body image the government's business? The answer — in Spain — is, apparently, when you are female.

I'm reading "All bodies are beach bodies’: Spain’s equality ministry launches summer campaign/Inclusive promotion urges women to ‘toast a summer for all, without stereotypes’" (The Guardian):

Spain’s equality ministry has launched a creative summer campaign encouraging women of all shapes and sizes to hit the beach, with the slogan: “Summer is ours too.” 

The colourful campaign’s promotional image features five women of different body types, ages and ethnicities enjoying a day in the sun. “Summer is ours too,” it says. “Enjoy it how, where and with whomever you want.” The campaign also features a woman who has had a mastectomy topless. 

“All bodies are beach bodies,” Ione Belarra, the leader of Podemos who serves as social rights minister in Spain’s Socialist-led coalition government, said. “All bodies are valid and we have the right to enjoy life as we are, without guilt or shame. Summer is for everyone!”

Maybe it's the government's business to promote the tourism industry and they have evidence that many women are avoiding the exposure. That might explain encouraging women and not men. Maybe men — however they look — just go to the beach when they want to go to the beach... or when they want to get a look at women's bodies. And that may be why we're seeing this ad, so men can gawk at it: 

El @InstMujeres lanza #ElVeranoEsNuestro. Cuerpos diversos, libres de estereotipos de género, ocupando todos los espacios. El verano también nos pertenece. Libres, iguales y diversas. pic.twitter.com/BjS3YDaEYR

— Toni Morillas (@antoniamorillas) July 27, 2022

I think it's quite weird for the government to be instructing people about when to feel shame. And "All bodies are valid" is a strange concept. Valid? Are bodies making an argument? Are bodies seeking some legal goal?

"This reminds me of the time I got thrown out of my local swimming pool for urinating in the water. 'But everybody does it!,' said I."

"'That's as maybe,' said they, 'But you're the only one to do it standing on the high board!'"

Comments somebody who calls himself Stoobs, at "Spanish city of Vigo introduces £645 fine for urinating in the sea" (London Times).

Judged by a wasp — "This tiny individual was judging me."

I'm reading Jordi Casamitjana interview: I’m a vegan thanks to Franco and wasps/An ‘ethical vegan’ fired by a charity has changed the law for his fellow animal lovers. His campaign began with a nest of insects" (London Times):

Something life-changing happened while Jordi Casamitjana was working on his PhD on the social behaviour of wasps. He was observing a nest when one of the insects turned and looked straight at him. “My heart was thumping,” he recalls. “This tiny individual was judging me. And it decided ‘you’re fine’ and didn’t raise the alarm [to the rest of the nest].” He vowed that day to devote his life to helping animals....

[His] devotion to his beliefs led a judge to rule... that ethical veganism is a philosophical belief and therefore a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010...

"Just hours after the Spanish island of La Palma rumbled and the volcano erupted, a theory about its wider repercussions began to gain strength, again."

"And despite the fact that the authorities, professionals, the Instituto Vulcanológico de Canarias and geologists from the National Geographical Institute deny it, the aftershocks of these claims continue to be felt.... According to the theory, if the island were to split in two, it would create a wall of water that would reach the coast of Portugal and southwestern Spain, which both lie to the north east. The waves could be up to 25 meters high, and would even cause damage to the south of England further north and then to the west they would reach the North American coast, as well as 'destroy the West African coast with waves of up to 100 meters,' according to the research."

AS reports.