You probably didn’t know this, but every year a very dedicated group of experts study and rank the finest bars, pubs and cocktail venues across the globe. Here’s the outcome of the 2019 list of the World’s 50 Best Bars.
For almost fifty years now there has been a debate about pollution, climate change, overpopulation, over-consumption and whether or not we are bringing doom upon ourselves. It began as a whisper, but now the swell of voices is rising, and in the virtual absence of corporate and governmental action, more and more people – among them the young who will inherit the earth from us – are trying to force change. At the core of this movement is the admittance that, regardless of whether or not we are causing global warming, we are turning this beautiful planet into a gigantic garbage heap.
Living on or visiting the Marbella coastline, we spend a lot of time looking out to sea and surveying the horizon. In the distance, the outlines of Gibraltar and North Africa sometimes seem close enough to touch – and indeed, whether you take a ferry, yacht or make use of a new half-hour Ryanair flight from Málaga to Tetuan, Morocco is just a short distance away.
So close and yet so different; the short hop across the western edge of the Mediterranean opens up a world of discoveries and an insight into an exotic world of casbahs, minarets and the call of the muezzin. It’s all just on the other side of the water we are so familiar with, where historic cities and beautiful mountain ranges mirror those of Andalucía. Despite the impact on the senses of a place that still has an almost medieval feel in places, where the scent of spices and natural fragrances hangs in the air, there are also definite similarities with Andalucía, for if you’re familiar with the white-plastered villages of southern Spain you will come across places that bear the hallmarks of centuries of interaction between these two shorelines.
Among the many creatures that have lived on this planet, humans are unique in that they not only tamed the wild and created large urban societies, but increasingly we are having an impact on the very fabric of the earth itself – and it’s not always for the better.
Words: Michel Cruz
When it comes to the ‘human planet’ we hear all sorts of things, many of them foreboding and some even seemingly contradictory – like there is too little space, too much development, that the population is exploding and the natural environment slowly dying, but also that the population is greying, that we’re not having enough children to replace ourselves. We consume and pollute too much, we are/are not contributing to global warming, that there is no global warming, that we will all have to work to 70 and beyond yet artificial intelligence will take our jobs away. We’re depleting the earth’s resources, that there will be land and water wars to replace today’s oil wars, that there is unemployment yet the labour force is shrinking. More immigration means economic growth but also more unemployment, and occasionally even that decades of overpopulation and over-exploitation have taken us to the cusp of a demographic collapse brought on by environmental decay and epidemics. (more…)
The Dutch are among the most notable expats living on the Costa del Sol. Through their organisations, businesses and investments they form part of and contribute greatly to the cosmopolitan community that is Marbella.
Words: Michel Cruz
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