He was the director of the prestigious ophthalmologist clinic Barraquer in Barcelona, founded in 1947 by his father and world-renowned doctor Ignasi Barraquer. Joaquim Barraquer was Professor of Eye Surgery at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Honorary Professor and Doctor Honoris Causa at several other universities. He was a specialist in corneal transplants and eye surgery to treat cataracts, glaucoma and myopia.
Street art is capable of addressing very different people and contexts, and this year’s edition of FiraTàrrega is marked precisely by an ambition to overcome differences and explore the intercultural potential of art. ‘Manifesta’, a large format coproduction of the festival, is the latest creation from Bobskené. A fun and festive song that celebrates difference while mixing text, music and circus, and which audiences will be able to enjoy for the first time on the 8th of September. The text is a multilingual manifesto, written in Catalan, Spanish, French and English, that reflects the seven nationalities of the artists that take part in the performance. “The manifesto makes us question the times that we live in and invites us to relax, to arrive to ecstasy and end up dancing”, said the director of the performance, Ricard Soler i Mallol.
Proxima b orbits within what is considered to be a habitable zone of the star Proxima Centauri. The temperature on the surface of the rocky planet could allow the presence of liquid water, according to the research, developed at the Queen Mary University of London. This means that Proxima b, which has 1.3 times the mass of the Earth, could potentially be the first planet to host life outside of the Solar System discovered by humans. The planet takes 11.2 days to travel around its star, Proxima Centauri, covering during its orbit only 5% of the distance that separates the Sun and the Earth. However, scientists argue that this star is smaller and less intense, making the existence of life possible.
The conservative People’s Party (PP) and liberal unionist Ciutadans (C’s) are negotiating in order to form a stable majority for a new government in Spain and Catalonia is one of the main issues on the table. The MP from Ciutadans Jorge Soler has confirmed that the so-called ‘Catalan package’ of demands from C’s to the PP includes changing the school model, even though education is a devolved power in Catalonia. The current school model has been in place for more than 30 years and is widely recognised by school teachers unions, associations and experts, as well as families. In Catalan schools, Catalan is the language of instruction in order to guarantee that all pupils end their studies knowing both Catalan, which not everyone learns at home, and Spanish, which is widely used both in the media and on the street. However, C’s has always campaigned against this system, saying that it discriminates against Spanish families that want their children to be taught in the Spanish language. That’s why they’re asking the PP to scrap the system and introduce a trilingual model with Spanish, English and Catalan. Some of the other ‘Catalan-package’ demands of C’s is a new fiscal system and the prioritisation of key infrastructure projects such as the Mediterranean Corridor. Both PP and C’s frontally reject a referendum on independence in Catalonia.
The Catalan multinational, through its international power generation business company Global Power Generation (GPG), has been awarded its first wind farm contract in Australia. The 91-megawatt park will be constructed in the state of New South Wales, 90 kilometres from the capital city Canberra. Gas Natural will invest €120 million euros in the wind farm, which will be named Crookwell II and will be situated in one of the more environmentally friendly areas of Australia. The contract will last for 20 years. The wind farm will be operational in the second half of 2018, according to Gas Natural.
The spokesman in the Catalan Parliament of the liberal and unionist party Ciutadans, Carlos Carrizosa, said in an interview with the CNA that voters in Catalonia will have to go to the polls next year because, according to him, the current government will collapse. “This very unstable government has the support of an unreliable and dangerous ally, the CUP, and it will not be able to survive beyond 2017. There will be elections and their result will worsen”, he stated. In September last year, Junts pel Sí and CUP together achieved 48% of the vote. According to Carrizosa, they won’t be able to improve this result in a new election, and this will mark the beginning of the end of the independence process. The Catalan government roadmap towards independence, led by President Carles Puigdemont, already foresees the call of an early constituent election next year.
He was the president of the left-wing pro-independence party Esquerra Republicana (ERC) between 1996 and 2004 and a renowned Catalan philologist. Carbonell was responsible for the first four volumes of the Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana (the ‘Big Catalan Encyclopaedia’), that he compiled between 1965 and 1971. During the Franco dictatorship he was incarcerated twice because of his anti-fascist and pro-Catalan language activism. One of the more famous sentences of the pro-independence movement is his: “Que la prudència no ens faci traïdors”, (“Don’t let caution turn us into traitors”, in English). He pronounced it on the 11th of September 1976, during the first Catalan National Day demonstration after the death of the dictator.
FC Barcelona’s defense of their league title began with a 6-2 win over Real Betis on Saturday evening with a goal from Arda Turan, two for Leo Messi and a Luis Suárez hat-trick. It may be a new season, but it was the same free-flowing attacking football on display at the Camp Nou that the home faithful have come to expect, as Barça cruised to a comfortable win to open the league campaign. If there were any nerves ahead of kick-off, they quickly subsided when Jordi Alba brought down Messi’s cross, before picking out Arda, who then prodded home to make it 1-0 after just six minutes.
A new poll shows that tourists in the Catalan capital gave the city a score of 8.6 on a scale of 0 to 10. An almost excellent result, which is, however, overshadowed by concerns by those same visitors that the city attracts way too many people. In fact, 58% of those that took part in the poll consider Barcelona’s tourist spots overcrowded. On summer Sundays, up to 20,000 people arrive in Barcelona by cruise ship. The figure will peak on the 11th of September, when up to 28,100 people are expected to arrive by sea. The tourism poll was conducted in 2015 in different tourist areas, hotels and airports and ports of Barcelona. From those taking part, 47.5% were visiting the city for the first time, and 52.5% had been there before.
The president of the civil society organisation Catalan National Assembly (ANC), Jordi Sánchez, stated on Sunday that the process towards independence has to be completed and a binding referendum needs to be called by the Catalan Parliament this autumn. Otherwise, he admitted, Catalan independence supporters might not achieve their goal. “We either start to complete this process (towards independence) or it will finish us off”, he said, admitting a certain fatigue amongst pro-independence groups. The ANC, together with Omnium Cultural and other civil society organisations in Catalonia, have for many years been organising massive pro-independence demonstrations every 11th of September, the Catalan National Day. In 2013, for example, they made a human chain from the North to the South of the country inspired by the Baltic Way, and in the last two years more than 1.5 million people demonstrated in Barcelona. The ANC is planning a new rally in 2016, this time with five different events across Catalonia.
12.7% more passengers used Barcelona El Prat Airport’s facilities during the first half of 2016 than in the same period last year. According to data released by the Airports Council International (ACI) and adding the figures corresponding to July, 25,028,393 people used El Prat’s facilities in the first seven months of the year. Thus, Barcelona’s airport has the second-largest passenger growth in group 1, which includes those airports with more than 25 million passengers per year, only behind that of Dublin, which registered 13.4% growth. However, in June, El Prat was the European airport which saw the highest increase in the number of passengers (10%) and its pace of growth was double that of the European airport average. According to ACI these good results are mainly due to the high amount of low-cost flights operated to and from El Prat, which was double the amount operated from Madrid. Moreover, the number of movements from January to July reached 117,326, which represents 6.5% more than in the same period last year.
The Catalan capital’s action plan against illegal accommodation for tourists resulted in July in the closure of 256 apartments whose activity has been considered illegal, a figure which has to be added to the 112 orders announced in the first half of 2016. Besides ordering the ceasing of their activity, the accommodation websites responsible for the flats, Airbnb and Homeaway, will have to face a 30,000 euros fine for not having the required licence. This has been possible mainly due to the task of the so-called ‘flat scouts’, a figure recently created by Barcelona’s city hall, who have found 234 illegal accommodations, while the official inspectors in charge of this only detected 22. “This is not a summer campaign but an action plan which has come to stay” warned Barcelona’s deputy mayor for Ecology, Urbanism and Mobility, Janet Sanz and emphasised that tourism in Barcelona “is not related to seasons”.
FC Barcelona have won the 51st edition of its own Joan Gamper Trophy with a 3-2 win over Italian guests Sampdoria on the night that the Camp Nou made its first contact with the 2016/17 squad, and especially with the five new signings. All of them were given time on pitch in front of a carnival atmosphere that was led by a sparkling performance from MVP Leo Messi, who scored the second and third goals after setting up the first in extraordinary fashion. The Gamper Trophy stayed in Barcelona for the fourth time in a row, and also provided Luis Enrique with the chance to see all of his players in match action ahead of the first competitive fixture of 2016/16, the Spanish Super Cup first leg in Seville on Sunday.
Mireia Belmonte won the 200-metre butterfly this Wednesday and became the first Spanish woman to win an Olympic swimming gold medal. The 25-year-old, trained at Club Natació Sabadell, not only improved her result obtained four years ago in London, where she obtained the silver medal, but registered the fastest time so far this year, 2 minutes 4.85 seconds, beating Australian Maddie Groves by three hundredths of a second. World champion Natsumi Hoshi came third. Belmonte’s gold is to be added to the bronze in the women’s 400m individual medley on Saturday, which was also the first for Spain in any sport at Rio Olympics. The Catalan swimmer’s four medal career haul makes her Spain’s most successful swimmer.
The pressure radical left pro-independence CUP have put to meet with Catalan President, Carles Puigdemont, in order to tackle the vote of confidence he will submit himself to on the 28th of September hasn’t been well-received by the Catalan Government’s spokeswoman. According to Neus Muntéit is “inappropriate for CUP to set the pace and conditions of the vote of confidence” since “confidence is non-negotiable”. Muntémade this statement this Wednesday in an interview with RAC1 radio in relation to CUP’s demands to agree with President Puigdemont the next steps in the pro-independence roadmap before the vote of confidence and also before negotiating the budget bill for 2017. In this vein, Muntéaccused CUP of being responsible for the present ‘stand-by’ situation that the Catalan Government finds itself in, since the radical lefties refuse to pass the bill for 2016.