Can a church be groundbreaking? The one in the parish of Santa Mónica is a miracle that surprises on all levels. It exceeds all personal beliefs and reinvents the concept of Spanish holy art. It is a place for shelter that is noted in the solid minimalism of its shapes, without lacking respect for any credo. Since it was created in 2008, this singular building has attracted as many religious faithful as it has lovers of culture and modern architecture. It has won them over, fifteen kilometres from the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, to the municipality of Rivas Vaciamadrid. It is impossible to ignore this shiny amalgam of steel and glass that stands out among the urban

  A Patio (courtyard) is an open space located inside a building and usually surrounded by a columned portico reminiscent of Roman peristyle. It is a typically Spanish architectural element, so much so that it is repeated under very different appearance, in palaces, in religious architecture and the more recent examples of popular buildings. However, when it comes to yards in a strict sense, the most famous are those of Andalusia and Cordoba in particular, direct heirs of the Roman peristyle, which the Muslims turned into true oases by enhancing the plants. The patios are distinguished by the explosion of plants and flowers inside the house: jasmine, orange blossom and gera

SANT ANTONI SUNDAY MARKET / BARCELONA: TIMELESS BOOKS. On Sundays, Barcelona smells of old books and steaming dust on a vinyl by Frank Zappa. Once every seven days, 52 times a year, the Sant Antoni Sunday market faithfully receives collectors of second-hand books, stamps or those in search declassified records. Between the Ensanche and the Raval districts, and now having run for more than 70 years, this market has become a meeting place for seekers of old titles at the good price, audio-visual materials and video games. OVIEDO MARKET: A PRIVILEGED CORNER. In the ancient quarter, Oviedo street market is held every Sunday morning. It is spread along eight streets and offers from bo

  If you are a fanatic of documentary cinema, you are already late in getting a ticket to Madrid and taking the Underground to Plaza de Legazpi. This is the place of the El Matadero Cultural Centre, a large complex devoted to contemporary culture that has fixed its sights on documentary cinema and has done so by devoting the fridge and the boilers of this vast Neo-Mudéjar complex, long home to livestock, to this genre of cinema.   In the fridge and the boilers, we no longer find meat, but rather large quantities of celluloid. The ‘Cineteca’, opened in 2011 as a further element of this centre of creation, has become the only place in Spain devoted e