BRILLIANT writer Antonio Gala has died at the age of 92 in Cordoba today (Sunday 28 May).

Gala, born in Ciudad Real in October 1930, was a worldwide famous novelist, playwright, poet and essayist.

He wrote his first story at the age of five, four years before he moved with his family to Cordoba. 

Gala started university when he was only 15-year-old in Sevilla. He graduated in Law and also obtained three other degrees in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in Madrid as a guest student. 

He published his first poems in different publications of the time while completing his university education. He also founded with authors Gloria Fuertes and Julio Mariscal two magazines during this period. 

After graduating, he started studying to become a State Attorney due to his father’s influence, but dropped to become a writer.

In 1959 he published his first poetry book, Intimate Enemy, for which he received an Adonais Award.

The versatile author also worked in the early 60s as an art history teacher and in journalism, in the now extinct Pueblo and Sabado Grafico publications. 

Gala then started to focus on the world of theatre, publishing the play Eden’s green fields in 1963. He published over 20 during his life. 

It was not until 1990 that the well-known poet and dramatist published his first novel, The Carmesi Manuscrit, which earned him a Planeta Award. 

He published his second novel three years later, The Turkish Passion, an absolute bestseller. 

Gala also participated in many political debates during the Spanish Transition (1975-1978). 

He defined himself as a left-wing man and in 1982, he positioned himself against Spain’s entry in NATO. 

He also collaborated with Spanish newspapers El Pais and El Mundo, in which the writer published an extense number of articles and columns. 

In addition to the Adonais and Planeta Awards, Gala obtained over a dozen of recognitions, including the prestigious Calderon de la Barca distinction.

Politicians, artists and writers have offered their condolences to Gala’s family, including President Pedro Sanchez.

“We have lost one of our best writers,” Sanchez published on his social media channels. 

A funeral chapel has been set up today from 10am at his Foundation’s auditorium in Cordoba and will remain open until 5pm on Monday May 29. 

A LOCAL police officer who assaulted a man in Torrox (Malaga) during lockdown has been sentenced to a two-year suspension. 

The agent has been found guilty of striking the man’s head and breaking his phone during an arrest in March 2020. 

The officer stopped a caravan with a German license plate which had expired the previous day. 

The victim’s wife explained to the officer that due to bureaucratic problems linked to COVID-19, they had not been able to obtain a Spanish plate, but that the application was in process. 

The agent then tore the front plate from the car, which altered the woman, who was taken inside a police car. 

Her husband was showing the vehicle’s documentation to another officer when the sentenced cop approached him from behind and grabbed his neck, according to court papers. 

The victim tried to free from his hands, but was pushed to the ground and shackled. 

The scene is said to have been recorded by various witnesses, who were told by the convicted agent to delete the footage. 

He also took the victim’s phone and crashed it against a wall and the floor at the police station. 

And when the man was being transferred to a cell, the assailant ‘unexpectedly struck him on the head’. 

A judge concluded that the officer employed ‘an unjustified use of violence’ and that he “attacked the dignity and moral integrity’ of the victim. 

The attacked man suffered from lacerations in his wrists, knees, right elbow and a part of the forehead. 

The abusive agent has been sentenced to nine months in prison and a two-year suspension. 

He will also have to pay €3,440 compensation to the victim and a fine of €600, according to Sur.

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RESEARCHERS at the University of Cordoba have managed to analyse, for the first time, a 2,000 years old Roman perfume and determine its fragrance and chemical composition.

Two thousand years ago, in the Roman city of Carmo, today’s Carmona, in the province of Sevilla, someone placed an ointment in a funerary urn.

Twenty centuries later, the FQM346 research team at the University of Cordoba, led by Professor of Organic Chemistry Jose Rafael Ruiz Arrebola, in collaboration with the City Council of Carmona, has been able to chemically describe the actual components of that ointment, believed to be a perfume from the 1st century AD, and prove that part of the Roman Empire smelled of patchouli, a fragrant plant native to Asia.

Until now knowledge of these substances and fragrances was based only on written and indirect sources, but thanks to this exhaustive research and the fact that residue of the perfume had been preserved solidified inside a perfectly sealed vessel carved in quartz, the world can once again ‘smell’ the bygone Roman Empire.

The result of this study has been published by the Swiss scientific journal Heritage in an article in which Ruiz Arrebola, the municipal archaeologist of Carmona, Juan Manuel Román, and the UCO researchers Daniel Cosano and Fernando Lafont narrate the whole technical and scientific process used.

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