City Country Culture

Durante mucho tiempo, se creyó que la Península de Baja California era una tierra maravillosa, llena de oro y perlas. Estas riquezas despertaron la envidia de los europeos: desde los conquistadores españoles hasta los industriales franceses, pasando por los misioneros jesuitas. Los pueblos indígenas llevan siglos luchando por preservar sus tierras de las ambiciones extranjeras.

In the early 1990s, the wilds of Kenya inspired Walt Disney Studios to create one of their most famous productions: The Lion King.

Warsaw seems to have preserved the medieval architecture of its old town from the ravages of time. Following the destruction caused by the Second World War, certain districts were rebuilt exactly as they were before. Ernst Lubitsch experimented with this reconstruction in Hollywood in 1942 with To Be Or Not To Be, his comic film poking fun at the Nazis.

Since the 20th century, a yellow train has linked Villefranche-de-Conflent to Latour-de-Carol, offering travelers a unique panorama of the Eastern Pyrenees. Nicknamed canary for its color, this railway turned the lives of the Catalans of the north upside down, torn between the French Republic and the Kingdom of Spain.

In Southern California, in the middle of the desert, stands an oasis of pleasure. In the 1940s, Palm Springs was virgin land where the stars of architecture experimented and reinvented themselves. Today, the city is an open-air museum of modernism.

The greatest legends of bullfighting have their careers made in the monumental bullring of Las Ventas in Madrid. It's a masculine world where women have not always been welcome. One early pioneer was even ready to declare herself a man to be allowed to fight.

In the buzzing city of Tokyo; works of art aren't just in museums or zen gardens... there's also the hidden masterpieces that don't get displayed. The traditional tattoo, called irezumi, is thousands of years old and carries with it the weight of a long and rich tradition. But modern mainstream Japan has little time for this forgotten slice of history. From the 13th century onwards, tattoos became a marker of social deviance and criminality. In modern Japan, it marked out the members of the brutal Yakuza. But now, it's having a renaissance among Japanese youth.

From its steep peaks to its wild coast, the Pyrenees is a wild land. During a pilgrimage on the way to Compostela, the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho got lost in these mountains. It was then that he entered into a strange pact with the mountain range that he would honour for years to come: he promised if he could write, he would return every year. He then went on to write his best-selling book The Alchemist.

Janis Joplin's music was forged by her native Texas and neighbouring Louisiana. The oil-rich conservative southern state of Texas was stifling to her, and her urge to flee drove her to become the iconic San Francisco hippie and darling of Woodstock. From folk sounds to heartbreaking blues, Janis Joplin's musical rise was meteoric. And like a meteor, her life burned brief and bright.

The heart of Belfast is a chaotic mix of Victorian and modern architecture. Passers-by admire the Ulster Hall, the city's iconic concert hall where crowds have flocked for more than 150 years. In the 1970s, the arrival of a punk music group set the whole town ablaze.

Women have always been part of the abrasive universe of Pedro Almodovar. While his characters are usually set in Madrid, it was in Barcelona that he shot the most acclaimed film of his career, All About My Mother. Under his director's gaze, the city morphs into a place of freedom, femininity, motherhood and of rebirth.

Underground American photographer Peter Hujar dedicated his career to capturing New York's nightlife and figures in the gay community. In the early 1970s, New York was where young queer people came to find freedom, self-expression and friendship, in an era that was still extremely socially repressed.