The weirdly beautiful church of Barcelona

The Sagrada Familia, is a church in Barcelona, Spain, which was built around 100 years ago. Well, actually it’s still unfinished. Its architect, the Spaniard Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) only lived to see about a quarter of it made. While having a very unorthodox shape inside and out, it has already been added to the Unesco World Heritage sites, despite not being …

In the Name of Spain

Spain has gone through several interesting name changes in its long history. When the area was first settled by immigrants from the desert around 3000 B.C., they were impressed by the vast amount of flowing water they found and named it “Iberia”, from “iber”, their word for river.

White slaves in Africa

Starting around the 1600s, many governments in North Africa allowed their people to raid and capture slaves from Europe. Pirates from the Barbary Coast of North Africa would set sail to Britain, Spain and parts of modern-day Italy and hunt for slaves.