Spanish publishers have been out in force this week at the London Book Fair, where they launched a website, newspanishbooks.com. Essentially it’s a marketing tool, designed to try to persuade the British trade to publish more works in translation, but it promises to be of interest to ordinary readers, as well as students of Spanish.
The […]

If you study Spanish in evening classes, it tends, even at intermediate level, to be language only; you’re unlikely to get a reading list of literature. So, Cervantes aside, what should you be reading?
The XIII Congress of Spanish Language Academies, held in Cartagena, Colombia, at the end of last month, threw up some suggestions. A […]

Just when you think a story is done it takes another twist. I have recently written a piece for the Telegraph about Córdoba, Andalucía, a city best known for a mosque that is now used as a cathedral. The Mezquita, one of the greatest monuments of Moorish Spain, has been a place of Christian worship […]

There’s a tradition in Spain of seeing the New Year in by eating one grape for each chime of the clock at midnight. It can rarely have been more sombrely observed than it was by firemen at Barajas airport in Madrid on Sunday.
They were digging in the rubble of a car park for two men […]

If improving your Spanish is among your New Year resolutions, take a look at NotesinSpanish.com. It’s the work of Marina Diez and Ben Curtis. She is a Madrileña who works for an information-technology company. He is an Englishman who arrived in Madrid in 1998 without a word of Spanish and now works as a translator […]

A new biography of Joaquín Sorolla (1863-1923), the Valencian painter best known for his luminous impressionistic seascapes, has just been published in Madrid, where the Thyssen-Bornemisza is currently exhibiting his work alongside that of his contemporary John Singer Sargent.
Reviewing the book in El País, José-Carlos Mainer suggests that the next edition should have a chapter […]

When I started this blog I keyed into the column on the right the addresses of a few favourite websites. Among them was that of the Spanish daily El País. It was then elpais.es; now it is elpais.com. The change is an acknowledgment that the site is getting 30 per cent of its hits from […]

When I was in Granada, Spain, in November last year, I noted this inscription on a plaque in the Alhambra: Dale limosna, mujer, que no hay en la vida nada como la pena de ser ciego en Granada. Roughly translated, it means: Give alms, my dear, for there’s nothing worse in life than to be […]

Every language teacher will tell you that there is no substitute for living in the country where the language you are learning is spoken. But what if you have come late to learning, and you can’t readily up sticks because you have a family, a job and a mortgage in some other country?
I’m lucky enough […]

If you are learning Castellano and want to deepen your understanding of those who speak it (or if you just enjoy holidays in Spain), read the latest edition of John Hooper’s The New Spaniards (Penguin, £10.99).
It’s a book that Hooper, who was The Guardian’s correspondent in Madrid immediately after the death of Franco, has had […]