The cover of this special issue portrays all the anguish, pain and uncertainty that have set fire to this 2020. There are two health workers who embrace and mourn the death of Esteban Peñarrubia, a nurse at the Severo Ochoa hospital in Leganés (Madrid), one of the first professionals of our public health victim of covid-19.
After the elderly, and their unjustifiable abandonment in residences, the health personnel are the ones who have paid the highest price - in lives and in infections - in the fight against the virus, which they faced in the first moments completely unprotected.
2020 has been a black year, without palliative.
We never suspected that globalization was also this: a tiny meteorite that hits Wuhan and transmits its capacity for destruction at lightning speed to the last corner of the planet.
We did not see it coming, we were not prepared and we have paid our pride with more than a million and a half deaths around the world and the collapse of our economies.
We believed we were safe in our hyper-protected societies, and we turned a deaf ear to the anticipatory signals released by other viruses, and to those who asked for contingency plans.
To be fair, blindness is not exclusively institutional: voters tend not to pay attention to politicians, managers or scientists who ask for resources for any threat that is invisible or incomprehensible to us.
This is the case of covid-19.
And even when that threat materialized was not enough for some: we have seen people on the street without masks, crying out "freedom!", And furious social network users spreading another dangerous virus, that of disinformation.
There are those who, from their official offices, became apostles of denialism and unscrupulously applied the basic manual of the good manipulator: faced with uncertainty, they exaggerate the confusion, discredit the experts, deny the evidence and point out a culprit.
By the way, Donald Trump is hurrying his last days in the White House, immersed precisely in the search for culprits, after losing the elections against Joe Biden by more than seven million votes.
Herd immunity.
Bend the curve.
Fomites.
Antigens
Pangolin.
Hydroalcoholic.
Aerosol sprays.
Lockdown.
Viral load.
Trackers.
Incidence rate… The inflation of new expressions, technical terms and dormant words that we incorporate into our everyday language in 2020 shows how exceptional this year is.
Some, as a
new normal
, seemed magical to us until we discovered their weakness.
We also dust off the language of war: fronts, rearguards, curfews, battles won and lost, failed strategies, victims, heroes and a common enemy.
Citizens, first in Italy, then in Spain and later in the rest of the world, find an expression more pure and exciting than all the epic gloss: the applause from the balcony, every day at eight in the afternoon, in homage to those who they have kept us alive.
The ray of hope has come in the closing stages of the year.
The British Maggie Keenan, 90, smiled when she received the first dose of the first vaccine against covid in our environment, a blow of effect that the United Kingdom wanted to capitalize at all costs now that it definitively breaks with the European Union.
So globalization was this too: a formidable transnational scientific, economic, cooperative and logistical effort to find, manufacture and distribute in record time the antidote to one of the most elusive viruses in history.
In addition to the precise mechanism of how SARS-CoV-2 works in our bodies, we still don't know many other things.
The depth of this second and brutal economic recession - the second in barely two decades of the 21st century -, for example, or when will recovery come, or the influence that accelerated technological changes will have on our personal and work lives.
We do not know how long collective solidarity will have to stretch to meet the long lines of hunger.
But we do know that we are still vulnerable, and perhaps one of the great pending lessons is how to deal with our feelings of fatigue, anguish, loneliness, irritation and grief.
Witnesses of a confusing and heartbreaking reality, in
El País Semanal
we have attended the appointment with the readers every Sunday of this cursed year, and this number that they have in their hands is the summary of this effort of photographers, journalists and editors, sometimes in very difficult circumstances, for knowing and transmitting the harsh reality that was lived in residences, hospitals, funeral homes, cemeteries and in the privacy of many homes.
At the beginning of April, one of our reporters spent three days in a large hospital in Madrid to experience first-hand the fierce fight being waged against the coronavirus.
He returned home: he avoided physical contact with his wife and children, disinfected what he was wearing, rubbed his skin in the shower until he was almost skinned.
He looked apprehensively at the notepad where he had written down everything he had seen, what he had been told.
He put it in the oven, just in case.
Miraculously, the ink did not rub off.
And so he could - we could - tell it.
Coronavirus
Brief chronology
The coronavirus stopped the world, but the Earth kept turning.
Trump fell.
Maradona died.
Social causes continued to rumble.
By
Pablo de Llano
Disaster and epic
By
Juan José Millás
It sprouted in the middle of a pandemic like those untamed flowers that make their way through the cracks in the asphalt, and with a weight (counting everything: skin, entrails, bones) that barely reached a kilo
The Chinese experience
How to be reborn after the virus, by
Macarena Vidal Liy
After being looked at with a magnifying glass as a possible origin of the pandemic, the great power rises whole after an effective management of the health crisis
Confinement
Walled Times, by
Irene Vallejo
Those who erect walls dream of an impossible security.
The word "safe" comes from the Latin
sine cura
, that is, "calm, without worry or care."
What this confinement has revealed is, precisely, the inalienable value of caring and being careful
The toilets
The applause was not enough, by
Ana Alfageme
Working in any health work was already heroic in Spain before the pandemic: a precarious and poorly paid job.
But the virus also posed a physical, mental and emotional challenge
Old
Silent Heroes, by
Rosa Montero
There has probably never been a society that has treated the old as badly as it is today.
The coronavirus fell on this miserable breeding ground
The hospitality
More empathy, please, by
Ferran Adrià
The covid does not respect anything or anyone.
And that includes all the hospitality industry, which has suffered and is suffering.
But it is clear that the disaster has not been the same for businesses in Barcelona or Madrid, Salou or Marbella
The economy
A slow normalization, by
Emilio Ontiveros
That will be the main sequel that this crisis will leave: the alteration of attitudes and behaviors after verifying that living conditions can also suffer from external elements, largely unpredictable
Culture
The cruelest of contradictions, by
Tereixa Constenla
The culture faced a new paradox: the economic collapse of its workers due to the cancellation of events while the consumption of its products soared
Education
The school of the pandemic, by
Ana Torres Menárguez
Nearly 8.2 million non-university students have seen the doors of their educational centers closed and how, at the same time, the deprivation of their homes seeped further into their academic trajectory
The Illa-Simón tandem
An uninterrupted press conference, by
Íñigo Domínguez
Simon always seemed to be late, behind the virus, and it was Illa who arrived on time, with poise.
If this is politics, strategy or also coincidence, we do not know
The vaccine
From poison to antidote in a year, by
Javier Sampedro
We believed we were safe from our hyper-protected societies and turned a deaf ear to the anticipatory signals released by other viruses and to those who asked for contingency plans.
Solidarity
The son of the sweeper, by
Almudena Grandes
The pandemic has increased the size of some images that have crept into our own home because they were on the next balcony, on the front door, in our parents' residence
Loneliness in the stadiums
Drawings, by
Martín Caparrós
And it is true that these empty stadiums have the obscenity of the naked king: that you can see his gathers, wrinkles, you can hear his screams.
But the world is full of naked kings and there they keep screaming
Memes
The collective couch, by
Lucía Taboada
In the face of uncertainty and concern, we have become senders and receivers of pandemic humor.
Social networks and especially memes have been an effective psychological ointment
Photogallery
2020 in pictures.
A cursed year ends, in which an invisible enemy, the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, hit the world and destabilized our lives, hospitals, economies ...
Photogallery
Covering mouth and nose.
Surgical, cloth, decorated ... Masks, compulsory in closed public places since May 21, and also outdoors since summer, are as essential to go out as keys or mobile
Spain
The tension
Necrophilous politics, by
Xosé Hermida
In no other great European country has such a political environment been experienced, with a gloomy Congress of Deputies and funeral atrocities crackling in speeches
Operation Kitchen
State sewers to the rescue of power, by
José Manuel Romero
In November Jorge Fernández and Francisco Martínez star in a sordid confrontation.
They try to evade their criminal responsibility for the illegal espionage of Bárcenas paid with public funds
The monarchy
The Fall of King Juan Carlos, by
Manuel Vicent
In August 2020, six years after abdicating, the former head of state left Spain.
A story whose ending is still unwritten
Catalonia
A country on the couch, by
José Martí Gómez
You speak with people who line up on one side of the ideological barricade and with those who line up on another, and with people who are not entrenched in either of the two, and you conclude that they are irreconcilable worlds that argue without listening.
International
U.S
The Year We Live It All, by
Amanda Mars
It began with the third trial of a president since its founding;
followed with the worst pandemic in a century, with the sharpest recession since the Great Depression of 1929 and with the largest wave of racial protests since the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968
Chile / Venezuela
Parallax Error, by
Leila Guerriero
In October, a large majority of Chileans approved the reform of the constitution in a plebiscite, and that the commission in charge of drafting it was made up of citizens elected by popular vote
Upper Karabakh
The Six Week War, by
Pilar Bonet
The conflict for the domination of Upper Karabakh has cost thousands of lives (Baku estimates its military casualties at 2,783 and Erivan at 2,425)
Culture
Consuelo Bautista
The goodbye of Juan Marsé.
On July 18, as a final nod to one of the writers who best portrayed late Francoism and the transition to democracy from neighborhood Barcelona, Juan Marsé died.
He was 87 years old and had received the Cervantes Prize in 2008. From Last Afternoons with Teresa to The Bilingual Lover or Lizard's Tail, he drew a successful career that portrayed us brilliantly.
This image was taken in 2014.
Tasrightsmanagemnt 2020 (Getty Images)
Taylor Swift's triumphant year.
After a few years in which pop has been dominated by Latin music and hip-hop derivatives, the younger folk roots, Dylan's heir, returns with a new queen like Taylor Swift.
2020 has been his year again, crowned with several nominations for the Grammy Awards for his latest work: Folklore, for part of the critics the best album of the year.
It was composed in full quarantine and will face Beyoncé and Dua Lipa in the next edition.
click on the photo Michael Dwyer AP
Nobel for poetry by Louise Glück.
“My soul withered and shrunk.
/ The body became a dress too big for her… ”.
They are verses from The Dress, a poem by the American Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. After a controversy with her publisher, Pre-Textos, it will be published in Spanish by Visor from 2021.
Sport
Goodbye Michael Robinson
You will never walk alone, by
Carlos Martínez
That spirit of yours capable of enjoying whatever there is: oysters or bacon.
If there was good vibes, they would give fries as well as torreznos.
The point was to enjoy
Kobe bryant
A universal icon, by
Robert Álvarez
That foggy and fateful morning of January 26 left the world the orphan of a sports icon, a 41-year-old budding entrepreneur, and a role model to many for his relentless work ethic.
Rafael Nadal
The unimaginable tennis player, by
Àlex Corretja
We are talking about an athlete of a different kind.
Only.
Why?
Because for Nadal there are no limits, or at least not those that circumscribe the vast majority of elite athletes
Marcos Brindicci Reuters
Maradona!
If Diego Armando Maradona was a crossing of symbols in life, he is much more so now after his death, on November 25.
We see him in an image taken in 2006 in his box at La Bombonera, with a Boca Juniors shirt, his soul team, a cigar and a Che Guevara tattoo.
In the image above, on November 26, thousands of fans take to the streets around La Casa Rosada, in Buenos Aires, where they were able to pay tribute, with national team jerseys and el10 on the back of the world champion .
In life he touched heaven and hell.
Now the legend remains.
Journalism
Journalism
In the age of lies, by
Javier Cercas
Good journalism is more necessary than ever.
One who does not limit himself to telling the truth, but also unmasks lies.
Or at least does not accept being an accomplice of them
Opinion
Still in 2020, by
Javier Marías
The anxieties and depressions have skyrocketed, the insomnia and nightmares, the mood is drained.
But you have to put up with something more