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1970s/2000s: In 1970s Spain, the country and its people were in influx
Outlaws
What you need to know before your trail
One summer’s day in Gerona a bespectacled, sixteen-year-old Ignacio Cañas, known to his few friends as Gafitas, is working in an amusement arcade, when a charismatic teenager walks in with the most beautiful girl Cañas has ever seen. Zarco and Tere take over his pinball machine and his life.
Thirty years on and now a successful criminal defence lawyer, Cañas has tried to put that long, hot summer of drugs, yearning and delinquency behind him. But when Tere appears in his office and asks him to represent El Zarco, who has been in prison all this time, what else can Gafitas do but accept
Travel Guide
“In the late 1970s, Spain was adrift between the death of Franco and the rebirth of democracy. The city was in influx with people moving from the poorer souht to the north in search of jobs and a better life. The streets in the north however weren’t paved with the gold people had hoped for and the result was a building tension and sense of despair amongst the youth of the country. With their lack of prospects, their rebellion would be brief and violent.”
“The city today has very little in common with what it was back then. In its way, Gerona at that time was still a post-war city, a dark, ecclesiastical dump, encircled by the countryside and covered in fog all winter”
At that time, for example, the city was surrounded by outlying neighbourhods where the charnegos lived. The word;s fallen out of fashion, but in those days it was used to refer to immigrants from other parts of Spain who’d come to Catalonia, incomers, people who generally didn’t hvae a cent to their name and who’d come here to get by…
Zargo lives in the los Albuergues provisionales, temporary housing on the city’s north east border. These were set up in the fifties for the influx of workers and still in use somehow.
The narrator lives just over the border from where the river Ter and La Devesa Park marked the divide. He lives on Catarina Albert Street
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Outlaws
Author/Guide: Javier Cercas Destination: Girona Departure Time: 1970s/2000s
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