Around the World

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 42: Mallorca Mallorca is the largest Balearic Island, the medieval kingdom that gave its name to a thirteenth-century Mediterranean state, the cultural landscape UNESCO inscribed for its Tramuntana mountain terraces, and the European leader in twenty-first-century tourism regulation. Mallorca deeper history starts with the […]

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 41: Valencia Valencia is the Spanish Mediterranean city that diverted its catastrophic river out of its centre after the 1957 flood, converted nine kilometres of dry riverbed into Europe’s largest urban park, and quietly became one of the most liveable major cities on the

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 40: Barcelona Barcelona is the Catalan capital that became one of the most globally recognised city brands in Europe without ever becoming a national capital, designed substantially by a single generation of nineteenth-century architects, the most famous of whom is currently being canonised by

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 39: Perpignan Perpignan has been French for 366 years. Perpignan was Catalan for the five centuries before that. The capital of the medieval Kingdom of Mallorca is now a French sub-prefecture. The flag on the town hall is the same gold-and-red striped Senyera that

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 38: Toulouse Toulouse, the city in southwestern France built almost entirely from rose-coloured brick, which was a sovereign Occitan-speaking state in the twelfth century, the target of a twenty-year crusade, and is today the largest aerospace manufacturing centre in Europe. Toulouse used to be

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 37: Bordeaux Every bottle of fine wine in the world has its price set, somewhere upstream, by a ranking written for an exhibition catalogue in 1855. The exhibition is forgotten. The ranking has not been altered in a hundred and seventy years. The Bordeaux

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 36: La Rochelle In 1628, the king of France killed more than three-quarters of a French city’s population to prove a point. The city was La Rochelle. The point was that France would, henceforth, be Catholic. La Rochelle’s strength as a France Protestant stronghold

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 35: Brest The city was destroyed in 1944. Not damaged. Destroyed. Ninety-five per cent of the historic centre, gone. The Brest a visitor walks through today is younger than my mother. Brest is younger than many of the adults who live in it In

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 34: Paris Paris was built by a France bureaucrat with a deadline. He had seventeen years, an emperor’s blank cheque, and a city he was instructed to make beautiful, modern, and impossible to barricade. The Paris a contemporary visitor walks through The wide boulevards

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 33: Avignon For sixty-eight years in the fourteenth century, every major decision in Western Christianity was made in a small French city on the Rhône. The Popes had moved. Almost nobody remembers. Avignon — The City in France That Was the Capital of Christianity