It has been a year of near constant parliamentary deadlock for Spain's left-leaning government but also one of strong economic growth in comparison to other eurozone economies. Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's Socialist Party won the Catalan elections in May and were once again the largest social democratic force in Europe after June's European parliament elections. Yet Sanchez and PSOE have also be subject to a long string of judicial investigations - most of which seem politically motivated.

Yet beyond the headlines of these cases, and with the government’s legislative agenda largely blocked, the country’s acute housing crisis and the difficult clean up operation after the floods in Valencia are both ongoing in the background.

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This week Eoghan talks to the author and journalist Michael Eaude. Michael is the author nine books, including ‘Catalonia, a Cultural History’, ‘Triumph at Midnight of the Century - A Critical Biography of Arturo Barea’ and ‘Sails and Winds - A Cultural History of Valencia’.

And during the last 25 years he has also worked as a self-described "necrologist",  writing some 70 obituaries for The Guardian on leading cultural and political figures from Spain’s 20th century.

He as now just published his first novel - ‘The Bones in the Forest’ - available from Clapton Press. As with his celebrated non-fiction work, the novel deals with Spain’s reckoning with its recent past and the country’s cultural and historic fault lines as the action jumps back and forth between the revolutionary 1930s and then the early 2000s. 

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This week writer and tour guide Nick Lloyd brings Catherine on a a more atypical historical route of Barcelona to uncover the lesser known layers to the city’s history.

They start at Estació de França, a historic train station not far from the city’s port where the International Brigades arrived to Spain. They then walk down to Ciutadella Park, where Barcelona’s zoo is located to discuss the haunting effects the war had on the animals and the origins of the park. They finish at Pompeu Fabra University, a building that still bears the scars of fascist bombings and which was known during the Civil War as the Karl Marx Barracks.

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130,000 people protested in Valencia last Saturday demanding regional premier Carlos Mazón resign from his post for his disastrous management of the floods which devastated the area two weeks ago. The death toll stands at 223 people while hundreds of thousands of others have had their homes and places of work gutted.

Eoghan spoke to journalist Leah Pattem about the protests and the ongoing recovery and clean up operations in Valencia. Leah is the founder of https://madridnofrills.com/

Last Tuesday evening as thousands of people were commuting home from work and many others continued at their jobs in supermarkets, cinemas, factories, beauty shops and restaurants, unprecedented flash floods hit the Valencia region.

That morning at 8am the Spanish Met office issued its highest warning level of maximum red, warning of extreme danger. But the right-wing regional government of Carlos Mazon failed to issue a civil protection alert to residents’ mobile phones until 8.15 pm that evening (a full 12 hours later)- by which time the worst of the flooding had already hit.

Serious questions are being raised about Mazon’s disastrous emergency management as rescue operations continue amid mass destruction and death. The death toll currently stands at 207 but is likely to rise substantially in the coming days while it remains far from clear when any degree of normal life can return to the region. Today on Sobremesa podcast we talk about the tragic events this week along Spain’s Eastern coast and the political failures and fallout from the floods.

This week Eoghan talks to author and journalist Dan Hancox about his new book 'Multitudes: How Crowds Made The Modern World’. It is a fascinating exploration of the collective joy and emancipatory  potential of different forms of mass gatherings while also tracing the obsession of elites and the forces of law and order in policing, delegitimizing and suppressing crowds.

Throughout Multitudes Dan returns to examples of the exuberance and potency of Spanish crowds - from Cadiz Carnaval to the 2012 general strike in Madrid.

This week Eoghan talks to financial journalist Gareth Gore. In his new book Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church Gore opens the lid on the extremist, reactionary sect Opus Dei. Opus was initially set up against the tumultuous backdrop of 1930s Spain and went to play a leading role in the Francoist dictatorship - both in education and then in 1957 with the appointment of three of its members to cabinet.

Gore traces how Opus went from Francoist Spain to playing a vanguard role in reactionary movements globally in recent decades - with its network of influence and patronage in Washington reaching its peak during Trump's 2016 presidency. 

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The island of El Hierro is at the centre of the Canary Islands’ current surge in irregular migration, receiving 13,000 refugees and immigrants this year – 2,000 more than its total residents. As hundreds die every month on the passage from West Africa to the popular tourist islands, the Spanish right are now weaponising the issue.

Leader of the far-right Vox Santiago Abascal denounced what he characterised as the “mass-scale invasion” of El Hierro by “illegal migrants” while conservative media outlets dubbed it “the Lampedusa of the Atlantic”, in reference to the Italian migration hotspot where a state of emergency was declared last year. “The far-right want to turn El Hierro into a symbol of division but they won’t succeed,” insists Amado Carballo, head of social affairs in the island’s local administration.

This week Eoghan and Catherine discuss the humanitarian tragedy on the Canaries and its politicization by the far-right. Please also see Eoghan's article: https://bylinetimes.com/2024/10/02/canary-islands-el-hierro-migrant-crossings/

Jim Jump, the editor of the poetry anthology "Poems from Spain: British and Irish International Brigaders on the Spanish Civil War", joins Alan to discuss the collection of poems that stretch the length Spanish Civil War and after. All poems were written by men and women participating in the International Brigades. They cover the lives of the poets themselves, recite poetry from the book and discuss why it was so prominent in the war.

The collection can be brought from the publishers Lawrence and Wishart's website here