Tag Archives: spain

Camino 2024, Part II: Finding a Stride

This is Part Two in a four-part series. Part One is here.

Day 1: Wet

It rains. And then it rains. And it rains some more.

We begin the Camino on a riverfront promenade and then cross the long span of the Ponte, built to stay above any flood. The Camino turns out of town and quickly becomes a country lane along a rushing watercourse, and we struggle around a marsh before finding easier paths. At first the Portuguese countryside looks to be in a state of crumbling disrepair, but the town of Arcozelo is well-tended, stone walls and gates holding fine lawns with swimming pools. Garlic-domed churches peek up here and there, their bells tolling out the walk in 15-minute increments, and roosters serenade us through the morning. The rain picks up.

Statistics would suggest about 200 people finish the Camino Portugués on any given day this time of year, but in Portugal, all above and beyond the 100 kilometers necessary for a compostela, the crowds are sparse. The first fellow pilgrims we see are a mother and a 10-year-old son on bicycles, plastic bags on over the kid’s legs to keep off the mud, the scallop shell that identifies a pilgrim strapped to the back of his bike. Later, by a thundering waterfall on the crystal clear Labruja River, two German girls march past, followed by a Frenchwoman who idly twirls a stick like a baton. We catch them all and collect a few more at a stop for coffee and sandwiches and a dry roof at Cunha Nunes in Revolta, the first of the classic Camino cafes that cater to passing pilgrims.

In our infinite wisdom, we have started our Camino on the stage with the biggest ascent on the whole route. Granted, summitting the 1,000-foot climb up the Alto da Portela Grande is no technical struggle for someone who tackles passes in the Rockies with a much heavier pack every summer, but it is long and steady, and did I mention it was wet? We slog upward, fixated only on the muddy path in front of us. Never is this truer than on the last great push up, where the trail has become a flowing cascade the whole way down, a lengthy dance up this dancing brook to a completely obscured overlook.

The descent is speedy, and as we have not booked any lodging between Ponte de Lima and Santiago ahead of time, we are enticed by a sign for an option with heat, private bathrooms, and rides to a restaurant in the otherwise sparse rural hamlet of Rubiães. We cross one last Roman bridge, are overtaken by rapidly marching Germans, and turn to find Sofía’s hideaway, where we arrive just behind the two younger German women we’d seen in Revolta, who have made their way back here after learning the municipal albergue has no heat or hot water. A crew of Taiwanese roll in a bit later, too, and we all populate the bedrooms on the upper level of Sofía’s house.

Despite strong defenses, everything is wet. So wet. We set about rigging everything up to dry, clothing draped all over the place, passports and papers placed over the heater to rescue them. One of the Germans, Ariane, joins us for 5:00 dinner at Bom Retiro, a mile down the road, where we consume heaping portions and a carafe of wine for about the price of a single American glass. The downpours come and go as they please, though we still hopefully note every time the sky grows lighter. The hope is always false. We pass out early in the evening to the soundrack of Sofía’s kid’s faltering trombone practice.

In past hikes I have been in more brutal downpours and I have climbed steeper slopes, but their total effect here makes for one of the most punishing days I’ve ever had on a trail. And yet, with the ability to wring everything out and take a warm shower and clear it all out with a hearty meal and some wine with good company, I am sold. If the Camino can be this enchanting on a day when the trail turns into a waterfall, what can it bring on a good day?

Day Two: The Fortress of Silence

On day two, though the rain threatens occasionally, is liberatory by comparison. We manage to turn the wrong way out of the hostel—we hadn’t realized the access road to Sofía’s was the Camino itself—but before long we’re at a glass box of a snack shop staffed by a woman from Massachusetts beside Rubiães’ main church and a Roman milestone used by later inhabitants as a sarcophagus. Much of today’s route is on the old imperial road, beginning with a big bridge over the River Coura followed by a series of mile markers, those same roads built for legions two thousand years ago still guiding pilgrims today. We wind up through a few hamlets, climbing again past sheep and garlic domes, and we pass a stream that boldly claims the be the troutiest in the universe. Before long we enjoy a steady plunge through a eucalyptus forest and moss-shrouded paths before a grand view of the Minho River valley opens up, our destination of Valença on the Spanish border looming in the distance. The pace differences between pilgrims are obvious on the descent, as we are both passed and overtaken.

At the bottom, the town of Fontoura proves a disappointment: first we are hounded by a Russian woman trying to sell us overpriced snacks, the ATM doesn’t work for me, and the café is closed. (If the Russian had told us this, we might have been more convinced to pay up.) Two Danish pilgrims are swimming off the medieval bridge over the Rio Pedreira, but from here the path is fairly nondescript, tame woods and clusters of homes, and then a long slog through suburban Valença. We stop at a roadside diner, pricey but filling, a pitstop for a bunch of local blue-collar men on their lunch breaks. After two days of pastoral Portuguese countryside Valença is a bit jarring, as we walk up sidewalks with backpacks while city life moves on, the once ubiquitous yellow arrows to guide our path now few and far between, dwarfed by the urban landscape.

A push up a long incline, however, takes us into a new world entirely: the walled medieval compound of old Valença, a fortress town for thousands of years, guarded by great earthen bulwarks below thick stone walls, all from a perch commanding the Minho valley, the bridges to Spain within reach of a good cannon volley. Inside the town are a bunch of narrow streets and a lot of shops, all of which seem to sell towels. Towels, sheets, comforters, pillowcases: this is indeed the historical craft of Valença, and they carry it forward now, selling them all by the kilo. (If you were to ask “who could possibly need a kilo of new towels,” my response might be “most lodging options on the Camino de Santiago.”) We find its 11th century church, groaning with history, and get to know São Teotónio, a native son and Portugal’s first saint. We eat pizza at a trendy little shop staffed by a woman who responds to Portuguese speakers in Spanish.

After a rest at the hotel we head out for a drink on the town, but we quickly learn the drawback of turning one’s town into a medieval theme park by day: by night, it achieves zombie apocalypse levels of deadness. No one is out, save for the tame cats by the church. We retreat to the room. My blisters have started to bloom, and I am in a blah mood. Valença is all very lovely, but it is a museum now, the pilgrims as unwitting accoutrements, and while it is perhaps the appropriate use of an old fortress atop a hill, one should not mistake it for Europe’s present. Take this night of quiet retreat, I suppose, and move on to Spain.

Day 3: Spanish Hibbing

After the torrents of day one and a vaguely ominous day two, day three dawns brilliantly, scattered sun and clouds but no hint of rain. An older northern European couple exits our hotel at the same time we do, but otherwise, Valença is as dead as it was the night before. We trudge down out of its dark gates and cross the Minho (or, now, the Miño) into Spain, past an austere Franco era guard station and on into Tui.

Spain is clearly wealthier than its peninsular partner. Fewer homes lie in ruin; there are real drainage systems. The pedestrian infrastructure is significantly better, and drivers actually stop for people. Every drink order comes with a snack. We are in a refined, thoughtful culture. There are trade-offs: gone are the blue tiles and garlic domes of Portugal. Rigid, solid stone now reigns supreme, especially in the locally mined granite, a building block to stand the test of time.

The seeming wealth is all relative, of course. Galicia is a poor corner of Spain, and like much of the country, its rural areas are emptying at such a rate that the moniker España vacía, or Empty Spain, has been slapped upon it. Next to well-tended homes are picturesque ruins, the slow decay of centuries-old structures no longer necessary to house the population here. Rural Europe in general is re-wilding at an unprecedented rate, with more and more greenery and the return of once-failing species such as the Iberian wolf. Of course this rush for the cities is happening in the United States as well, albeit blunted by immigration and somewhat higher birth rates. But immersion in a place where construction is very old gives a sense of just how complicated it can be to live among structures that predate modern technology, and just how much the run to the cities is reshaping the countryside. There is an eternal tension here between preservation and keeping things livable and letting them fade, a blurry spectrum for each small community we visit on this walk.

We rise up to the old city of Tui, a fortress to counter an invasion of towel-wielding Valençans, broad stone cathedral on top. As snake through the streets, we pass herds of pilgrims emerging to blink at the sunlight. At just over 100 kilometers from Santiago, this is the most common starting place on the Camino Portugués, and for the first few miles out of Tui it shows. We are caught up in a clump of 10 Spaniards plus a British expat named Alan, an Aussie herd, and a clump of British girls with unfortunate laughs who cackle at everything. These and other groups begin to leapfrog each other, with Alan and the Spaniards brimming with energy on day one but stopping to photograph everything. We pass another Roman bridge, ford a stream by a cross to a sainted pilgrim who fell fatally ill here, and enjoy placid, leafy lanes. The lack of breakfast in Valença has my dad growing hangry, but we’re delighted to find a snack break at a new establishment in A Magdalena, which manages to space out the pilgrim crew a bit and leave us in tandem with Marcia and Michelle, two American sisters who are good company.

We come to the massive granite works of O Porriño, complete with signs protesting its growth and a bevy of large houses from that very stone built to withstand the millennia. The debate here is familiar to anyone who comes from a place where people pull things out of the ground. There are more gentle lanes up and down wooded hills, a bunch of lazy dogs, a hobbled German pilgrim with a wounded knee, and our Taiwanese friends from night one. Porriño is not the most enchanting place on the Camino, but a river walk into town does some good in crowding out the factories on the opposite bank and the freeway on the near one, and the historic center, while not large, teems with life. Our lodging is basic but well-appointed, its view down over a busy bus stop. After Valença, I appreciate just watching humanity go about its business.

It strikes me, after a couple of beverages at the Underground craft beer bar, that Porriño is just a Spanish Hibbing, the equivalent of a blue-collar Minnesota mining town I know well. It has 17,000 people, a handful of historic buildings in its downtown, and is near enough to some pretty landscapes, but is itself otherwise forgettable in its urban form. And yet there is wonderful food, top notch wine, good craft beer even though that scene here has nothing on America’s, and it teems with life and bustles with families late into the evening, long after any American town of the same size goes dead outside of a couple nondescript bars.

I come away with a soft spot for Porriño, even if it has few clear charms. Here there is none of the museumification that consumes the centers of many small European towns. It is here where Galicia lives in its present, striving, dreaming like our enthusiastic craft beer convert behind the bar at the Underground, caught up in a debate over saving the verdant forests or mining the stone that has built this region’s wealth and newer homes. Kids pour out of a nearby school, bum around squares, settle into social circles even as they dream of a life beyond the bland apartment blocks that surround the old city core. In some deep sense, people in places like this will always be my people, the steady believers in a land that is anything but empty to them.

Day 4: Galifornia

Day four dawns grey and misty. Breakfast is jamón and tomato atop a large slice of bread from a harried woman as Alan and the Spaniards dine a few tables over for the third meal in a row. Porriño departs slowly, long damp streets before a winding road and the 100 kilometer marker to Santiago. The next few kilometers stroll through the town of Mos, a sleepy place that welcomes its pilgrims brightly and then turns them loose on a series of steady ups into the Galician hills. We trudge up with groups of Spaniards, including one jolly older man with a deliberate pace, though we lose him when we turn aside for lunch near the hill’s summit, a sandwich with a killer view. From there we go down, first on gentle slopes with the loud Brits behind us. We escape them at a churrascaria, however, and are alone for the plunge down into the outskirts of Redondela.

This walk down the hill is both incredibly steep and incredibly beautiful, rich green hills dotted with farms and cottages, fruit and flowers, resplendent in sudden sun, a snippet of a Ría Baixa, an inlet off the Atlantic, visible in the distance. Our hostel-keeper for the night calls this region of Galicia Galifornia, and I understand why. Everything is resplendent and lush, all that rain now showing its gifts. Closer to the mouth of the strait sits Vigo, one of the largest cities in Galicia, but our destination is Redondela, a city of 20,000 known for its towering train viaducts and old town on a hill, close to the sea but removed from it.

After a short urban trek we find the old town, and we’ve lucked out with our lodging. A Casa de Herba stands on a small square the middle of narrow stone streets, and our second floor room has a long balcony from which we can survey a small square and the narrow lane the Camino traces through town. The smell of cooking seafood wafts over us, and I sit on the balcony and write as we wait out a slow laundry load. We wander about, meet Julie and Susan from Saskatchewan at a sidewalk table, eat fish, stumble on a place with a craft beer fridge and retire to the balcony. The city life of old town Redondela flits by below us, pilgrims wandering in, locals heading out, kids chasing each other about, even some nuns.

We are halfway to Santiago, at the peak of the walking experience, all the buildup to this point now beginning its release, an exhale as we settle into this way of being, a pace set for the rest of the walk. I have little to write today. I am one with it.

Part 3 is here.

Europe 2023, Part III: Out on a Peninsula

This is the third in a four-part series. Part I | Part II

After seven days at sea, the cruise ship disgorges my 41 family members and me in Barcelona. While our inevitable dispersal brings a magical week to a close, I am glad to be free from Royal Caribbean’s controls on my movements. A little more space, wandering back at our own pace, ready to explore two more cities that have set themselves up well for me to like them.

Barcelona is both the capital of the Mediterranean basin and the standard-bearer for modern Europe. Though there is some graffiti around town trashing tourists, it is certifiably alive in ways that museum pieces like Venice or straining old metropolises like Rome are not. It has reinvented itself dramatically over the centuries: Roman roots, a Gothic core, a grand City Beautiful charge from the 1800s embellished by Gaudí’s ornamental flair, and a cosmopolitan boom in recent decades that has it pulsing with young life, beaches and clubs plus art and architecture, enough Catalan ingenuity to keep it from becoming a stale playground for the wealthy alone. The buildings are stunning and quirky but functional, the trains run on schedules to the second, and the food and drink have little competition. The three Duluthians in our party stay across from the old cathedral on two pedestrian Gothic Quarter streets, a maze that loses none of its luster even after a week of meandering cities with similar appeal.

Barcelona is not without its warts. There are pickpockets afoot, and I have a bizarre interaction with a man who tries to scam me with a Metro ticket before I rather unwittingly turn the tables on him by only having five Euros in cash in my possession. The Catalan separatist struggle, while invisible on this visit, drives at the heart of the European tension between lofty universal ideals and local tribal pride. Even FC Barcelona, after reaching new heights in fútbol achievement a decade ago, now flounders in debt and corruption after overreaching as it tried to keep up with the Gulf and Russian oligarch money that has besmirched the sport across Europe. Barcelona is also a very raunchy place, which is not in and of itself a defect, but any edginess does rather wear off when one passes a tenth little shop selling t-shirts with the same trashy slogans in English. Some bits of culture are, alas, universal.

Grumbling aside, Barcelona is still a special place, the city a whole continent wants to think it can be. It also has some reminders of home, as I have a quick rendezvous with friends from Duluth who are also passing through and then visit Black Lab, a brewery owned by a Duluthian who makes some of the best beer we find in our wanderings. My cousin Steph and her husband Kyle lead me on a sampling of vermut at a quiet neighborhood bar north of the city center. A rooftop tapas dinner is the last 10-plus person family gathering on the trip, and the desserts, including the beet ice cream with a cake and the very cheesy cheesecake and the ice cream dish featuring a tray with several vats of the stuff with cones and toppings, are the winners. The next morning we make a circuit of Parc Guell, Gaudí’s experiment in a meandering pleasure ground where visitors have no real agenda other than to stroll its pathways and lose themselves in a mix of naturalism and neo-Gothic design. Tapas lunch comes a few blocks from the Sagrada Familia, the magnum opus of the architect who gave this city its flair, slow but steady progress evident in the 19 years since my last visit.

The group slowly disperses from Barcelona: many straight back to the States, some to linger here or nearby on the Balearic coast, a few back to Italy or off on lengthy tours. For my mom, her partner Doug, my cousin Rob, and me, it’s a ride on the AVE high-speed train across the Spanish plain to Madrid. The train hums with power as we shoot over the meseta at 300 kilometers per hour, through small towns with hilltop castles and churches, olives and grapes, and a lot of windmills that look unlike anything Don Quixote would have encountered in his wanderings here half a millennium ago. At times the landscape is so barren as to evoke, say, eastern Montana, but before long we are edging into Atocha station in one of Europe’s great former seats of imperial power.

Madrid will never quite match Barcelona’s underlying cool, but it is a delightful place. Even though the kings based here dominated most of a hemisphere for centuries, it lacks the consistent grandiose scale of a London or a Paris or even a Rome. The Palacio Real sits starkly alone on the edge of the city center, surrounded by gardens; the Plaza Mayor is one of Europe’s more cloistered central squares, with no 19th century grand avenues punched through its colonnades. The Parque del Retiro is sprawling, but its green cover likewise encloses a certain intimacy, and while there are other triumphant arches and plazas scattered about, they seem to blend with the city, opening up logically even when they may seem haphazard from a bird’s eye view. Quality urban form is, of course, one of Spain’s great triumphs and exports to its former colonies.

Spanish culture is, if not insular, decidedly peninsular. This will happen to a nation that mired itself in inquisitions and counter-reformations as liberalizing advances made their way across the rest of Europe, but the view from 2023 is one of a place distinctive in its flavor, a collection of fairly stable local cultures that share a political system out of Madrid but often little else. Modern Spain is much less unified than France or even Italy, the difference obvious enough even in simply visiting its two largest cities. Madrid and Barcelona feel like different countries, and then there are the Basques and the Galicians; our last dinner comes at an Asturian restaurant, a nod to the lush pocket of the northern coast where apples and cider reign supreme. And that’s all in the northern half of the country alone, skipping over the massive Moorish influence in sunbaked Andalucía.

We spend a chunk of our first full day in Madrid touring the Museo del Prado. The Prado, while massive, does not have the worldliness of the Met or the Louvre or the British Museum: here, Spanish masters like El Greco and Velázquez and Goya still reign, alongside some associated Venetians and a few Dutch masters who drifted through the Habsburg orbit. In the Prado, Spanish artists and imperial collectors gathered works of nobility and religious iconography, but little else. To tour the Prado is to view countless Assumptions and Immaculate Conceptions and Passions, alongside myriad temptations of saints and looming sin. And yet there is still incredible range on display, from the cluttered fever dreams of Hieronymus Bosch to the stark austerity of Velázquez’s Jesus on the cross, from the subtle mastery of Las Meñinas to the empathy in every Goya portrait. Another gallery stages El Greco next to Picasso, showing ties across generations between artists who, at first blush, have nothing in common. The Prado’s collection, more than any royal language academy or stuffy French defense of certain standards, is the epitome of a cultural patrimony.

Otherwise, most of our Madrid time is devoted to wandering, with stops in the Basilica de San Francisco, the cathedral, and in the Corte Inglés department store, where I buy a new suitcase. We find the status of Cervantes in the Plaza de España and educate ourselves on the various Carloses, Felipes, and Alfonsos seated on horseback around the city. (I muse as to whether the Felipes could have prevented the decline of the Spanish Empire if they spent less time posing on horseback.) The streets of Madrid feel safer and better tended than Rome or Barcelona, though there is still an element of the absurd, with busking accordionists playing the same eight tunes or people dressed in giant panda or Mario costumes at nearly every attraction. (How they live in these things in 90-degree Spanish summer heat is beyond me.)

One could paint staid, imperial Madrid as a tired counterpoint to sexy Barcelona and its beachfront brethren, but when the sun goes down, Madrid shows out. The routine across three straight nights here is the same: after siesta, tapas and wine, with dinner extending through to midnight. Traveling with Rob means we have nonstop great food, and instead of sitting for dinner for hours as in Italy, here one can drift about for tapas, served almost immediately and savored slowly, a movable feast whose style I would gladly import across the pond. We continue our bold quest to find decent Mediterranean basin beer and have better luck here than anywhere else, including from a brewery named Oso whose bear-head-on-hops logo eerily resembles one in Duluth. My European culinary apogee comes at Juana la Loca, a tapas restaurant that was high on Rob’s list and turns out to be just one block from our Airbnb off the Plaza de Carros. The truffles, crab, and foie gras carry me away to a blissful place, and we walk off the meal with a stroll to a nightcap at a mezcal bar with the prettiest menu I’ve ever seen, with a detour for some people-watching at blocks-long line outside the one nightclub that apparently attracts every single Madrileño youth.

I am pleased to find my Spanish still perfectly functional once I kick off the rust, though plenty of Spaniards still open conversations with us in English, which I suppose is our blessing and curse as native speakers of tourism’s universal tongue. Still, there are moments of pride: at one dinner, Rob and I proudly order in Spanish before realizing there is an English menu if one scrolls further down; we sit between a loud British couple who demand the biggest beer available and a group of Indians who scandalize the waiter by asking for red pepper flakes. With competition like this, we are model tourists, blending smoothly into a country where I’ve scarcely spent a week.

Even model tourists must go home, however, and after three nights in Madrid, drained by rotating through my modestly sized Italian wardrobe and still anxious about my bag, I am ready for a return journey. If things go according to plan, I will be back on the Iberian Peninsula before long, ready to sample more of its diversity, more of its tapas, and more of its inviting streets before the siesta calls. I have no Spanish blood, but as the child of a Spanish professor and someone who studied in Madrid some 40 years ago, and this peninsula feels like a natural extension of my life.

Part Four is here.

Spring Fútbol in Spain

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had to find a way to endure the gap between high school hockey and the baseball season. The NCAA Tournament is some consolation, but not much of one for us jilted Hoya alumni, and I’ve never liked basketball all that much to begin with. Instead, I let my attention wander overseas, where a pretty nice race is shaping up in Spain.

The European soccer leagues are now in their respective stretch runs, and on Sunday I was treated to an exemplary installment in European soccer’s biggest rivalry. The goals flew left and right, and while the referee imposed himself a bit more than one might like, Barcelona came out with a crucial 4-3 come-from-behind road victory over Real Madrid. The win rescued Barcelona’s chances at the La Liga title, and gives them reason for optimism heading into their other two trophy competitions—a Copa del Rey clash with Madrid in a few weeks, and in the quarterfinal stage of the European Champions League. The match-up had been hyped as a changing of the guard, with aging Barça perhaps finally relinquishing the crown Spain’s most expensive team. It wasn’t to be.

The man who grabbed the headlines was, of course, Lionel Messi, whose hat trick answered any questions about his recovery from injury, and quieted the tiresome efforts of the Madrid backers to suggest that Cristiano Ronaldo might have surpassed him. Messi breaks records nearly every time he scores these days (and he’s still just 26!), and his performance in his prime is a once-in-a-generation joy to watch. But just as dominant in Sunday’s win was Andrés Iniesta, the sublime midfielder with a flair for the dramatic. Iniesta’s goal in the seventh minute set the tone for the rest of the night, and his effort to wriggle through a pair of Madrid defenders earned the decisive penalty kick late in the game. At Barcelona he will forever be in Messi’s shadow, but the man who scored the game-winner in the 2010 World Cup final and was named the Player of the Tournament in the 2012 European Championships would be a legitimate superstar anywhere else, yet the quiet man from La Mancha is content to humbly play the wingman to Messi.

While Barça isn’t guaranteed of anything yet, they look much better heading down the stretch this season than they did a year ago, and the reasons lie in the wrinkles introduced by new coach Tata Martino. They’ve done a much better job of rotating their squad this season, keeping the top players fresh, and while they still rely on their bread-and-butter passing game and the peerless all-Spanish midfield of Iniesta, Xavi, Cesc Fabregas, and Sergio Busquets, they’re a bit more willing to play with pace on the counterattack now. Oddly unimportant in all of this is Neymar, the 22-year-old Brazilian record offseason signing, but he has some excellent flashes, and will slowly find his way into the system. Their demise, as has been the case of late, could be on defense, where Martino joins his predecessors in wishfully thinking that Javier Mascherano can hold down the back line against the best in the world. (I like Mascherano, but a central defender he is not, especially on a team whose fullbacks are often found bombing down the wings.) Goalkeeper Victor Valdes’s season-ending injury midweek could also dent Barça’s title hopes.

Real Madrid has also evolved tactically since last season, with new boss Carlo Ancelotti adopting a much more direct approach than José Mourinho’s dull counterattacking game. Against inferior opponents, it does look better, but the natural tradeoff here is a thinner midfield, where Xabi Alonso alone cannot quite cut it against an attack of Barcelona’s caliber. The front line of Ronald, Karim Benzema, and Gareth Bale piles up a lot of goals, but it isn’t clearly better than Barcelona’s somewhat deeper front line; like his fellow expensive transfer Neymar, Bale has been hit-or-miss in his first season in Spain, and Benzema, despite scoring twice against Barcelona, probably should have had himself another goal or two. Real’s saving grace may be the less-hyped midfield duo of Luka Modric and Angel di Maria, both of whom are having stellar years.

The thing is, neither of these teams is leading La Liga right now: that honor instead goes to Atlético de Madrid, the Spanish soccer equivalent of the New York Mets, the team that just sort of hovers there in the shadow of a giant crosstown rival. Atleti doesn’t have the firepower of the two perennial contenders—they’ve scored 14 fewer goals than Real, and 21 fewer than Barça—but they make up for it with rugged defense. Time will tell if they can hold up for another eight fixtures, plus a Champions League quarterfinal showdown with Barça. Those two also play on the regular season’s final day, so the race could be in for a thrilling conclusion. If Atlético can pull it off, it would be the first championship by someone other than Real or Barça in ten years.

Real has a somewhat easier road both in Spain and in the Champions League, where they drew injury-riddled Borussia Dortmund in the quarterfinals. The favorite to win the thing, Bayern Munich, also has a pretty easy path forward, having drawn reeling Manchester United. (David Moyes, given the unenviable task of succeeding the legendary Sir Alex Ferguson as manager, is allegedly facing open revolt in the dressing room, while opposing fans unfurl banners applauding his coaching skills. Once again, American sports fans have nothing European football fans.) The last quarterfinal, between Chelsea and Paris-St. Germain, is perhaps the most intriguing. PSG is very talented but has yet to win anything of any magnitude (the French league doesn’t count), while José Mourinho will look to rediscover his specialness and help English football save some face. I’ll admit it, I’m rooting for him: there is no more delightful mixture of arrogance, style, and coaching brilliance anywhere in the world.

Spain’s La Liga doesn’t draw the American audience that England gets, and that was true even before NBC snapped up the Premier League; the language barrier probably plays a role there, as does the league’s very real issues with competitive imbalance. But while Spain doesn’t have England’s depth of decent teams, it does have the best stable of top-end teams of any European league. The Brits and Italians have not fared particularly well in Europe over the past two years, while France and Germany are both dominated by one lonely powerhouse. Spain, meanwhile, has three serious contenders every year between Barcelona, Real Madrid, and one rising interloper, whether that be Atlético, Málaga last year, or Valencia in the not-so-distant past. In the Champions League, it is Europe’s best.

All is not well here, though, with debt burdening many of the lower-tier teams. Spanish soccer gives a taste of the best of the sport, but also more than its share of the worst, with its giant financial inequities and the growing gap between the haves and have-nots. Superficially, it’s easy to like international club fútbol: there are good teams in so many countries, and those teams draw from everywhere. Yet for all the apparent cosmopolitanism, this global sport is more ruthlessly capitalist than any major American sports league. While I actually prefer a bit of imbalance to some of the more rigid salary-capped leagues–sports need dynasties and villains– and one wonders just how strong the foundations really are in European soccer. The good news: we have a World Cup in less than three months!

Fútbol Evolves

For the past six years or so, soccer fans have enjoyed (or been endlessly annoyed by) the domination of two teams: the Spanish national team in international competitions, and F.C. Barcelona in club competition. Spain has won the past two European championships and the 2010 World Cup, while Barcelona won three of six Champions League titles (the European Super Bowl, so to speak). Seeing as six to eight regulars for Spain have also play their club soccer for Barcelona, the two are, effectively, the same core squad. There are key differences, of course: Barcelona enjoys the services of one Lionel Messi, the greatest player on earth at the moment; the Spanish defense is somewhat better than Barcelona’s, and they also boast the sainted goalkeeper Iker Casillas of Real Madrid. But the similarities in style are all too obvious, and there is no doubt that the heart and soul of both squads is the midfield of Xavi, Sergio Busquets, and Andrés Iniesta.

In the past three months, both dynasties have come apart. First, Barcelona lost to Bayern Munich in the Champions League semifinals by a brutal 7-0 scoreline over two matches, and earlier today, Spain was thrashed 3-0 by an inspired Brazil squad in the Confederations Cup final. There are excuses out there: Messi and a couple of other key players were hurt for the Munich matches, and the playing Brazil in Rio de Janeiro a few days after a draining semifinal against Italy is no easy task. Several players have shown signs of age, as well: Xavi and Casillas aren’t what they used to be, and the strikeforce that carried the Spanish national team, Fernando Torres and David Villa (the latter also a Barcelona man), has been out of form for a few years now.

But even more importantly, there is the sense that the style of play made famous by both squads has been eclipsed by that of its rivals. Both teams relied on that famed midfield to unleash the mesmerizing “tiki-taka” passing patterns that wore down the opposition, demoralizing them with relentless ball control. The few teams that beat Spain or Barcelona usually “parked the bus”—that is, they put as many people back on defense as possible to clog up the area in front of the goal and hope to spring the occasional breakaway the other direction when Spain or Barcelona overcommitted offensively. Bayern and Brazil, however, took the game straight to Barcelona and Spain, pressuring them across the pitch and unleashing a physical style that the smaller Spaniards struggled to match. Their defenses, always the teams’ weaknesses (to the extent they had one), were exposed badly, while the pedestrian forwards not named Messi have had zero answers. The midfields have been rendered unable to control play anywhere near the level they used to, and their offenses have degenerated into Iniesta trying to dribble through five defenders.

As damning as that end of tactical dominance may sound, however, it is by no means the end of these great runs by each team. It’s not a coincidence that the two teams that have beaten them have relied on a pair of rock-solid holding midfielders to shut down the tiki-taka, and with Bayern star Javi Martínez gathering dust on the Spanish national team bench, perhaps it’s time to pair him with Busquets to give La Roja its own strong defensive midfield. It might not be as sexy, but it’s not like they’d lose much by taking off one of their mediocre forwards, and that strength would allow offensive fullbacks such as Jordi Alba to range forward into the attack more often. Up front, the national team also has some options; winger Jesús Navas, who came on in the Brazil game a bit too late to make a real difference, adds an element of speed and pace that is otherwise missing from the plodding tiki-taka, and should start playing more. It’s also probably time to start working in the next generation, which early evidence suggests is just as talented as the last one; while it’s hard to see the likes of David de Gea, Isco, and Thiago Alcántara starting full-time by next year’s World Cup, an infusion of youth could add a needed spark to an otherwise aging squad.

Untroubled by the limits of national boundaries, Barcelona opened up the checkbook this summer and bought themselves Neymar, the 21-year-old Brazilian wunderkind who just finished making mincemeat of several of his future teammates for the national team. There are some questions as to how well he’ll jell with Messi, but the potential is there for one of the most lethal combinations in fútbol history. Even if he isn’t an instant hit, he should at least lessen Barça’s Messi-dependence and open up some space for other players on the team. They still have some pressing needs on defense, and just about every center back on the market has been linked to the Catalan giants. Barcelona, too, may want to consider adding a second holding midfielder: like Spain, they have got a good one on their bench in the out-of-position Javier Mascherano, and Bayern certainly showed that such a lineup need not come at the expense of artistic play going forward. This would be especially helpful for the Barça defense, as their fullbacks are even more offensive-minded than Spain’s.

All dynasties must come to an end; it’s impossible for a team to put together a core that will win championships for ten years or so. But with flexible leadership, there’s no reason that a great team can’t build a second dynasty with a little bit of tweaking around the edges. Both Spain and Barcelona have the resources to do so. It’s now up to the teams’ respective managers—veteran Vicente del Bosque with the national team and the green Tito Vilanova at Barcelona—to prove their worth.