They share their dreams on an outdoor futsal court that’s been fenced off and turned into a makeshift camp by residents of the La Reina neighborhood in Ceuta. Some 350 women and children who arrived in the Spanish enclave city after swimming from Morocco 11 days ago sleep in the camp every night. They sit here waiting, on the ground, or, if they are lucky, on a rug.

They are waiting because, beyond these four fences and the two men guarding the entrance through the night, the world seems a safer place. Among them are children who dream of becoming footballers, studying technology or training as nurses. Children who have crossed the sea and who, without realizing it, have become the subject of a political debate before anyone has taken the time to listen to them.

EL PAÍS asked them to write letters so that politicians, especially those who say they do not want them in Spain, could learn about their aspirations. They do not write about borders or laws. They write about their dreams, because sometimes behind the word “migrant” there is a child who has not yet stopped imagining who they want to become.

Hello:

My name is Ismaíl. I want to stay in Spain to fulfill my dream of becoming a great footballer. If you let me stay in your country, you would help me a lot. With a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, one day I could become a talented player and represent Spain in the national team.

Ismaíl is 12 years old and completely alone in an unfamiliar country where he does not speak the language. Even so, he smiles often, proudly revealing the gaps where some of his teeth have yet to grow in. He arrived in Ceuta by swimming alongside his 20-year-old brother. He has not seen him since.

He sleeps on the ground. To wash, he goes to the vacant lot beside the camp and pours water over himself, fully clothed, using a pink beach bucket. Afterwards, the bucket passes from hand to hand among the women and children living there.

The little boy knows nothing about the controversy sparked by the arrival in Ceuta of hundreds of unaccompanied minors. He does not know that the Spanish Minister of Youth and Childhood, Sira Rego, has convened a meeting this Thursday to address the crisis in Ceuta. He also does not know that the far-right political party Vox is against receiving them. He knows nothing of the political arguments, the borders or the language others have chosen to use when discussing his future. But despite his young age, he is not surprised this is the case. He says he “knows very well that politicians in Spain do not want Moroccans to enter their country.”

Beside him sits 15-year-old Maryam. Her dark hair is tied back in a braid and she is still wearing the clothes she arrived in. With a ballpoint pen, she writes in Arabic in a notebook:

I wanted to come to Spain to work and help my family. I dream of finishing high school and becoming a nurse so I can help other people. Please regularize my status so we can build a better country together. We will show that we are worthy of your trust. We only want a better future.

She had been thinking about coming for three years. On July 30, at 4 a.m., she decided to try. She left Tetouan with a cousin and two friends. She was frightened because she is not a strong swimmer and knew that leaving her mother behind would not be easy. When she reached Spain, the first thing she did was log on to Instagram to talk to her mother. She had not warned her she was leaving and wanted to apologize. “She was very worried, but when I told her I was okay, she wished me all the success in the world because she understands that coming here had always been my dream,” says Maryam, smiling shyly when asked why she did not tell her mother about her plans.

Samia, 20, was a teacher in Morocco. Now, after arriving in Ceuta by swimming, she acts as a translator for Maryam. She explains that there are far-right parties that oppose relocating migrant minors to other regions in Spain. Maryam opens her eyes, surprised. “But why don’t they want to give us papers?” The question comes out plainly, without any understanding of political parties or political rhetoric. Samia laughs.

The hours drag on beneath the scorching heat. The ground burns when someone tries to sit down. In the vacant lot just outside the enclosure, two workers are attempting to install a portable toilet. It will be only the second for the more than 350 people taking refuge here.

The city council has just provided it after repeated appeals from the neighborhood association president, Abdellah Mustafa, who also spearheaded the idea of turning the soccer pitch into a safe haven for migrants.

Next to the toilets, a woman washes clothes beside a stroller while her baby crawls across the ground. When the mid-afternoon sun becomes unbearable, the child bursts into tears. Nearby, several girls sit exhausted on the curb, shaking out their clothes.

Despite everything, they are the lucky ones; at least they have a place to spend the night. More women continue to arrive asking whether there is any space left, but the enclosure is full. There is no room for anyone else. The volunteers guarding the site cannot take them in, and they will have to spend another night out in the open. Save the Children estimates that more than 1,000 minors in Ceuta are sleeping on the streets outside the official protection system.

Mohamed and his mother watch the scene unfold while playing clapping games to pass the time. The boy is eight years old, with large, dark-brown eyes. Whenever someone asks him a question, he falls silent for a few seconds, thinking carefully about his answer, mouth slightly open and cheeks flushed, before finally speaking.

Until they found shelter here, Mohamed and his mother were sleeping on the street, outside a house. He says he felt terrified every time he saw the soldiers deployed across Ceuta.

Like Ismaíl and Maryam, Mohamed also writes his dream on a piece of paper:

I want to be a police officer and work to help my mom. I want to get the documents I need because I deserve a chance to prove myself.

In the meantime, he waits. He cannot explain why, but he is convinced this limbo will last another two weeks. Until then, he will follow the same routine every day: have breakfast, find another child to play with, eat lunch and wait for another day to pass. “And then the same again,” he says

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Actor and environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio has come out in defense of the Pehuenche frog (Alsodes pehuenche), an amphibian listed as critically endangered, amid concerns that the Los Cóndores-Río Diamante power transmission project in Chile’s Maule region could threaten the species’ survival.

In an Instagram post on Sunday, in which he tagged the Chilean Herpetological Network and shared photographs of the frog and its habitat, the Titanic star warned that fewer than 1,000 individuals remain. He said Chile could approve “ a catastrophic plan to destroy the heart of their only known habitat.”

DiCaprio stressed, however, that his appeal is not aimed at halting the project altogether. “Conservationists are not asking for the transmission project to be stopped,” he wrote, but rather for it to be built in a location that would not expose the species to greater risk.

The project referenced by DiCaprio, developed by Enel Generación Chile, involves the construction of a 500-kilovolt power transmission line designed to interconnect the energy grids of Chile and Argentina. On the Chilean side alone, the plan calls for a 26.6-kilometer overhead transmission line and 72 high-voltage towers, infrastructure that would cut directly through the habitat of the Pehuenche frog.

A key milestone for the project had been scheduled for Monday, when the Environmental Assessment Commission (COEVA) was due to rule on a report by the Environmental Assessment Service (SEA) recommending its approval. However, following DiCaprio’s message, the session was suspended. No public explanation has been given for the postponement, nor has a new date been announced, Claudio Azat, director of the One Health Institute and co-chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) amphibian specialist group, told EL PAÍS.

The Chilean government of José Antonio Kast responded to the actor’s comments. Environment Minister Francisca Toledo told Radio ADN that DiCaprio’s message referred to a project that remains under environmental review and therefore declined to comment on its merits while the process is ongoing. Instead, she defended Chile’s environmental institutions, saying: “Chile has a robust environmental framework in which all the evidence is examined and weighed as part of environmental assessments.”

The Pehuenche frog exists nowhere else in the world except the high Andes of Chile and Argentina. The person who helped bring the species’ plight to the attention of Re:wild, the conservation organization co-founded by DiCaprio, was Chilean biologist Claudio Azat.

“It is a little-known species. It was described by science about three or four decades ago,” Azat explained. “We know it has a very restricted distribution and that its main threat is the international highway that connects the Chilean city of Talca with Malargüe in Argentina.”

This amphibian is distinguished by the fact that, during the breeding season, males develop patches of gelatinous spines on their chests and fingers. They are also known as “Popeye frogs” after the famous cartoon character because their forearms become enlarged, allowing them to hold onto females during mating.

The species was classified as critically endangered in 2018 and has yet to recover from that status. “It is a species found only in the Alto Maule region, in the Pehuenche Valley, inhabiting small streams and wetlands fed by snowmelt and glaciers high in the central Andes, at elevations above 2,000 meters [6,500 feet],” Azat explained. “Its population numbers around 1,000 individuals.”

The conservationist acknowledges that, although campaigners had been raising concerns about the frog’s plight for years, the visibility generated by DiCaprio’s message has provided a decisive boost. “This is the second time he has supported a species in Chile. In 2019, he posted about the campaign to save the Loa frog, which was very positive because it changed the situation for that species,” Azat concluded.

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Some love stories end, but the surnames involved never quite stop crossing paths. Three decades after Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere starred in one of the most iconic and widely discussed romances of 1990s Hollywood, it is their children who are bringing those worlds together again.

Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere co-star in The Shards (available on Disney+), Ryan Murphy’s new series based on Bret Easton Ellis’s novel. The unsettling thriller is set in 1980s Los Angeles and follows a group of students at an elite private school as they confront the threat of a serial killer targeting teenagers in the City of Angels. The coming together of Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere’s children has inevitably rekindled interest in a couple who turned every public appearance into a media event.

Both Homer Gere and Kaia Gerber have been asked about their parents’ relationship while promoting the series. Both have confirmed that they had never met in person before and only got to know each other a few days before filming began, though they have spoken about one another with nothing but admiration.

For Kaia, Homer is a “wonderful” person, and working with him has been “lovely.” “He makes me laugh so hard and he’s the greatest scene partner ever,” she told E!.

Homer, meanwhile, recalled that first meeting with a laugh: “From the inside, it’s really normal,” Homer, 26, continued. “We just became friends as coworkers before we started working and she’s become a really close friend.”

The Shards marks the first major leading role for Richard Gere’s eldest son, 26-year-old Homer Gere, who has only been pursuing acting for the past two years. Before trying his luck in Hollywood, he earned a degree in Psychology and Visual Arts from the prestigious Brown University.

As for Kaia Gerber, already one of the highest-paid models of the past decade, she has balanced her runway career with an increasingly prominent acting résumé in film and television, though she is still searching for the role that will firmly establish her as a leading figure of Hollywood’s new generation.

Long before their children were co-stars, it was their parents who captured all the attention. Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford were one of the most powerful couples in 1990s Hollywood. Gere was already an established star who had just cemented his status as a global heartthrob thanks to the success of Pretty Woman, while Crawford was enjoying a meteoric rise on the runways alongside fellow supermodels such as Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington.

According to People magazine, their first encounter took place in 1988 at a barbecue hosted by influential photographer Herb Ritts. The publication reports that Crawford was immediately captivated by the charisma of the An Officer and a Gentleman star. He was 39 years old; she was just 22.

However, it was not until three years later that they made their high-profile debut as a couple at the 1991 Academy Awards, an event still remembered for the spectacular red Versace gown Crawford wore. With its sweetheart neckline and crisscross straps, the dress remains one of the most iconic red-carpet looks of all time.

Just a few months later, the pair said “I do” in a wedding ceremony in Las Vegas. Everything happened so spontaneously that, as Crawford later recalled, Gere proposed on the very same day after finishing a filming session and gathered a group of friends onto a private jet bound for Sin City.

“It wasn’t the wedding I had dreamed of as a little girl,” the model admitted years later. Crawford walked down the aisle in a navy Armani suit and wore a ring hastily fashioned from a piece of aluminum foil.

Their marriage was under the spotlight of the tabloid press, and rumors that their relationship was little more than a publicity arrangement designed to boost their respective careers never really went away. Crawford even found herself publicly refuting speculation that Gere was gay.

“Why? Because he has a lot of gay friends? It’s amazing to me, considering the number of women he’s associated with,” she said at the time in an interview with Rolling Stone. “Plus, we won’t say he’s not gay, because he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with being gay.”

The couple was married for four years, until 1995, but the 17-year age gap between them ultimately took its toll on the relationship. Crawford made an effort to embrace many of her husband’s interests, from baseball to Tibetan Buddhism, yet over time she realized they were at very different stages in life.

“I think part of the problem in our relationship was that we were a lot of other things, but I don’t know if wewere ever friends — like peers, because I was young, and he was Richard Gere — And then, as I started kind of growing up and growing into myself — it’s hard to change the nature of a relationship once you’re already in it,” she reflected years later on a podcast.

The model also acknowledged that the actor taught her how to handle fame, although distance ultimately became another of the marriage’s greatest challenges. “We didn’t spend enough time together,” she said at the time in an interview with People magazine. “And we’re equally responsible for that. We thought it would be okay if we just flew in from Paris to L.A. to get together for a night to see each other. It wasn’t.”

Three years after their split, Cindy Crawford finally had the wedding she had always dreamed of. She married businessman Rande Gerber in the Bahamas. The couple, who have two children, Kaia and Presley (also a model), remain one of the entertainment industry’s most enduring partnerships.

Richard Gere, meanwhile, found love again in 2002 with actress Carey Lowell. Their marriage, which lasted 12 years before ending in 2014, produced a son, Homer. After launching his acting career with a role in Euphoria, Homer is now taking his biggest step yet as the lead of The Shards. The young actor is also set to appear alongside Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone’s upcoming film White Lies.

Gere married for a third time in 2018, tying the knot with Spanish publicist and entrepreneur Alejandra Silva, with whom he has two sons, Alexander and James.

Now, 30 years after their separation, the celebrated actor is witnessing his story with Cindy Crawford gain an unexpected new chapter, this time through the next generation.

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