With the leaves yellowing and the autumn now firmly in place, most of us probably have quite some time before we'll be heading out to Spain for a holiday again. Those wonderful beaches with their the chiringuitos, the pools, bars and restaurants and all that wonderful Spanish food; it makes you want to get [...]

Lina's class on Monday evenings is currently setting up a WhatsApp group to allow her, as the teacher, and the students to exchange information, keep up to speed if anyone has missed a class, find out what the homework is (so there is no excuse for  not doing it!) and generally make life easier for [...]

Fiction, fantasy and philosophy - Jorge Louis Borges (Part II) If you weren’t with me last time, I’m looking at the career of one of the most famous Latin American (if not world) writers. In the 1950s, Borges became almost totally blind.  The irony of the affliction of blindness on a writer was not lost [...]

Fiction, fantasy and philosophy - Jorge Louis Borges (Part I) Most Lorca students and quite a lot of non-Spanish speaking people, will know of Gabriel García Márquez, the world-famous Colombian novelist, author of such literary masterpieces as One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Love in the Time of Cholera who died in April last year.  How [...]

If you were with me last time (and if not why not?) you’ll know I’m having a little look at what comes out of our friend Mr Google when you key in ‘strange things about Spain’. One of the most interesting things I came across was the claim that the Spanish, and most specifically [...]

…we are looking at one of the most iconic symbols of Spain, the Osborne bull. If you have been in Spain on holiday, you almost certainly have seen one of these famous silhouettes, standing proudly on hillsides and near major roads.  There are 90 Osborne bullsspread around the roads in Spain, 21 of them [...]

In many parts of Spain, you’ll see the huge black silhouette of a bull, standing on hilltops and near the road.  It’s a world-famous symbol of the country, yet when all is said and done it is still, primarily, an advertising vehicle for the sherry and brandy producer Osborne. Osborne was founded in 1772 by [...]

Halloween, which is a Celtic festival in origin, has spread across the world, reaching, some would say, its apotheosis in the USA, where trick or treat seems to be an exercise in rampant commercialism that has now trickled its way across the Atlantic. In Spain, and Hispanic countries generally, Halloween is, strictly speaking, only [...]