GoBeyondia

24/06/2026

🤔 Which city is this? 🇪🇸 Every Spanish ship from the Americas docked here for over 200 years
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🌐 Around the World with Beyondia
🧵 Mediterranean Region
🪡 Episode 44

23/06/2026

🇪🇸 Madrid. For most of its history, Spain had no fixed capital — the court moved between cities. Then in 1561, King Philip II chose Madrid: a small dusty town on the high central plateau, with no river worth the name, no industry, no history.

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia
🧵 Mediterranean Region
🪡 Episode 43

His father, Emperor Charles V, reportedly warned against it. Philip chose it anyway — because empty was the point.
Toledo was too powerful — the Church dominated it. Seville was too rich — the merchants ran it. Barcelona, Valencia, Zaragoza — each had institutions that would resist centralisation. Madrid had nothing. A Moorish fortress from the 9th century and a small town around it. Philip moved the court in 1561 and never issued a formal decree explaining why. The absence of explanation is the explanation.
The Manzanares River was so unimpressive that Quevedo mocked it in the 17th century — suggested someone sell the bridge and buy water. Napoleon's troops asked locals where the river was while standing on its banks. The Plaza Mayor was completed in 1619 for markets, bullfights and executions. The Royal Palace — 3,418 rooms, the largest in Western Europe by floor area — was built after the old Alcázar burned on Christmas Eve 1734. No king has lived there since the 1930s.
The Prado holds Velázquez's Las Meninas, Goya's Black Paintings, Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. The Reina Sofía holds Picasso's Guernica — returned from New York only in 1981 after Franco died and democracy returned. Three museums, one kilometre, eight centuries of art. The Golden Triangle.
Madrid stays up later than any major city in Europe because of politics. Under Franco, public gatherings were restricted. When the dictatorship ended in 1975, the Movida Madrileña exploded — music, film, art, nightlife as defiance. Almodóvar, Alaska, Radio Futura. Freedom arrived and expressed itself at two in the morning. Dinner at ten. Drinks at midnight. Streets full at three. The city hasn't gone to bed since.
A capital built on nothing that became the centre of everything — because one king understood that the most powerful place is the one that owes its existence to nobody. The empire fell. Madrid never did. 🏛️

22/06/2026

🤔 Which Spanish region is this? 🇪🇸 Three UNESCO World Heritage sites in one region
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🌐 Around the World with Beyondia
🧵 Mediterranean Region
🪡 Episode 43

20/06/2026

Mallorca 🇪🇸 There's a word for what happens to a beautiful coastline when too many people come. It's named after this island.

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia
🧵 Mediterranean Region
🪡 Episode 42

For three thousand years, Mallorca received whatever the sea delivered — traders, conquerors, rulers, pirates. The Romans took it in 123 BC. The Moors held it for three centuries and built the irrigation systems still feeding the almond groves. James I of Aragon conquered it in 1229. The Gothic cathedral — started that year, not finished until 1601 — rises directly from the harbour wall. Gaudí redesigned part of the interior. Chopin composed preludes in a monastery cell in Valldemossa. Robert Graves moved to Deià in 1929 and never left. He's buried in the churchyard overlooking the sea. The Tramuntana mountains are UNESCO World Heritage — dry-stone terraces carved into vertical limestone over centuries.
Then in 1955, a single charter flight landed. Spain under Franco was cheap, sunny and desperate for foreign currency. Tour operators began flying package tourists directly to Palma. Mallorca now receives roughly sixteen million visitors per year for a resident population under 900,000. In peak summer, the population triples. The southern and eastern coasts were developed at a speed that left permanent scars — Magaluf, S'Arenal, Cala Major.
The word Balearisation entered the urbanist vocabulary in the 1970s to describe the uncontrolled overdevelopment of a coastline. It has been used globally ever since. The islands that gave the world one of its most beautiful coasts also gave it the word for destroying one.
Mallorca is fighting back. Water restrictions, building moratoriums, tourist tax, limits on rental licences, and local protests under the banner "Mallorca no es ven" — Mallorca is not for sale. The island that surrendered to what the sea brought is learning to say no for the first time in three thousand years.
The beaches are still extraordinary. The Tramuntana is still silent. The cathedral still rises from the water. But the question Mallorca is asking is the question every beautiful place will face: how much of what the sea brings can you survive? 🏝️

19/06/2026

🤔 Which island is this? 🇪🇸 Twice a year, sunlight draws a perfect figure-of-eight inside its cathedral
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🌐 Around the World with Beyondia
🧵 Mediterranean Region
🪡 Episode 41

18/06/2026

Valencia 🇪🇸 For a thousand years, a river ran through this Spanish city. Then the city moved it.

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia
🧵 Mediterranean Region
🪡 Episode 41

On 14 October 1957, after three days of rain, the Turia burst its banks. Water tore through the streets. Three-quarters of Valencia went under. The official toll was 81 dead — the true number likely higher. Franco's government suppressed the coverage. The dictator didn't visit for two days.
Within months, Valencia made one of the most radical engineering decisions of the 20th century. The Plan Sur rerouted the Turia three kilometres south onto an entirely new course to the Mediterranean, bypassing the city centre completely. The original riverbed — a wide curve through the heart of Valencia — was left empty.
In the 1970s, planners proposed filling it with a motorway. The citizens organised one of Spain's earliest major urban protests. "El llit del Túria és nostre i el volem verd" — "the riverbed is ours and we want it green." They won. The Jardín del Turia opened through the 1980s — nearly nine kilometres of park on the exact course the river once followed. At the eastern end, Santiago Calatrava built the City of Arts and Sciences in the old riverbed — the most visited cultural complex in Spain, sitting where the river used to meet the sea.
Valencia's relationship with water is older than the flood. The Tribunal de las Aguas — the Water Court — has met every Thursday at noon outside the cathedral since at least the year 960 to settle irrigation disputes among farmers. It is the oldest functioning judicial institution in Europe. UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. A city that moved its river still governs water with a thousand-year-old court.
Valencia didn't fight the river. It moved it — and then refused to let anyone fill the space with anything less than what the city deserved. 🏛️

17/06/2026

🤔 Which city is this? 🇪🇸 After a deadly 1957 flood, this city moved its entire river
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🌐 Around the World with Beyondia
🧵 Mediterranean Region
🪡 Episode 40

16/06/2026

Barcelona 🇪🇸 The most famous Mediterranean beach city — and the beaches didn't exist before the 1992 Olympics.

For most of its history, Barcelona turned its back on the sea. Where the sand is now, there were factories and railway lines — a wall of industry cutting the city off from its own water.
Barcelona was founded as a Roman colony — Barcino — in the 1st century BC, a kilometre inland. The city grew inward, not toward the water. By the 19th century, the waterfront was textile mills, metalworks and railway depots. Barceloneta was a working-class fishing quarter wedged between factories and the sea. There was no promenade. No beach culture. The Mediterranean was right there and the city had its back turned.
When Barcelona won the 1992 Olympics, four kilometres of coastline were cleared, graded and rebuilt from nothing. Sand was imported — from the seabed, from quarries, and reportedly from as far as Egypt and Morocco to achieve the golden colour the planners wanted. The Olympic Village rose on former industrial land. Frank Gehry's golden fish went up where smokestacks had stood. In three years, Barcelona went from a city that ignored its coastline to the most photographed beach destination in Europe.
But the Mediterranean current carries 30,000 to 50,000 cubic metres of sand away every year. The beaches need constant replenishment — dredged, trucked, pumped back in. They are infrastructure, not nature. Maintained like roads.
Gaudí never saw a beach in Barcelona. Picasso never sat on one. The culture of beach life the city is globally famous for is younger than most of the people enjoying it. An entire city identity invented in three years and adopted so completely that nobody questions it.
Barcelona didn't inherit its relationship with the sea. It manufactured one. A coast you imposed is a coast you have to keep imposing — forever.

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia
🧵 Mediterranean Region
🪡 Episode 40

15/06/2026

🤔 Which city is this? 🇪🇸 It couldn't reach its own beach until the 1992 Olympics opened it to the sea
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🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 40

14/06/2026

Crete. Mykonos. Santorini. Where Europe began. Where the spotlight moved. What Three Famous Islands Are Hiding

🌐 GoBeyondia Atlas
🧵 Mediterranean Region
🇬🇷 Greece

Crete. Mykonos. Santorini. Where Europe began. Where the spotlight ...