While much of the rest of Spain is still reeling from years of economic contraction, a massive hike in the rate of unemployment and a collapse of the property market that has left tens of thousands of homes unsold there is one corner of southern ...

The grinding crisis that has been battering Spain's economy since 2008 is starting to rock the very foundations of society with increasing numbers of people resorting to scavenging for food and whole households subsisting on zero disposable income. ...

In Spain, memories of Franco's fascist dictatorship which only ended with the death of el Generalissimo in 1975, are still fresh amongst the older generations. With an estimated 150,000 people disappeared and believed killed by government forces ...

Despite frequent media reports about immigrants drowning at sea, being abandoned by traffickers who take their money or being deported from Europe the columns of hopefuls seeking a better life and work seem to keep on arriving at Europe's borders. ...

At 400 metres long, 73 metres high and 59 metres wide, she's a big girl by anyone's standards. Weighing in at 55,000 tonnes, she can accommodate up to 18,000 containers in her voluminous belly and, while not exactly a racer at a top speed of 25 ...

Samuel Aranda goes on a journey through Iran at a time of both stagnation and change. While crowds took to the streets to mark the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, many are also eager for change after the 2013 election of ...

An outbreak of Ebola, a highly contagious and deadly virus, has killed more than 700 people in Guinea, where the outbreak started, and in neighbouring Sierra Leone and Liberia. Usually transmitted through the blood or other bodily fluids of infected ...

India has the largest number of child labourers under the age of 14 in the world. With an estimated 12.6 million children engaged in hazardous work, the country's impressive economic boom hides the crushing poverty which compels such large numbers of...

In 2006, FC Barcelona won football's European Cup for the second time in their history. Their victory in the continent's premier competition crowned two years of success which had seen the team win the affections of millions of neutral fans with their ...

Dramatised in films like 'City of God' and 'Elite Squad', Rio's sprawling slums, or favelas as they're locally known, both fascinate and appall with their sheer size, density and endemic violence. According to a 2010 census almost a quarter of Rio's ...

At 155 years old, Providencia is Rio de Janeiro's oldest favela. It was originally formed when soldiers of the Canudos War, a brief and brutal civil conflict in Brazil's Northeast at the end of the 19th century, returned to the city and settled ...

They come from Morocco, Mali, Yemen and Cote d'Ivoire; from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. They even come all the way from Nepal and beyond. Tens of thousands of people are on the move at any given time, trying desperately to get into Europe - on ...

In the Appalachian mountains of eastern Kentucky, the sick and uninsured have learnt to wait. One wintry Friday, a convoy of white trucks and trailers pulls up to the Knott County Sportsplex, built on the site of a disused coal mine in Soft Shell, ...

The Chagos archipelago, a chain of islands in the Indian Ocean, is one of the last outposts of the British Empire. Its people have been the enduring victims of a shameful example of colonial power politics, which saw the islanders forced into exile by ...

A portrait of survivors, yesterday's people in the land of the free. The United States of America may be the world's one and only superpower, but many of its people have been left behind by economic, social and cultural 'progress'. These are the people ...

Many commentators now see the escalating conflict in Darfur as the first climate change war. Until twenty years ago African farmers and Arab nomads in Darfur coexisted, but from the mid 1980s increasingly frequent drought cycles and the Sahara's ...

Looking at Tim Dirven's black and white photos of Afghanistan, I experience a sensation akin to a wave of recognition. Where have I seen that same expression of helpless anger, like in the stare of the man with his starving wife in a refugee camp? ...

Oumar Chagaev, Fatima Davdieva and their three children fled Grozny in July 2000 during the Second Chechen War and eventually received political asylum in Belgium. In 2010, as Belgian nationals, they returned to Chechnya for the first time to visit ...

Mark Henley's book and exhibition 'China [sur]real' is drawn from 16 years of independent journeys through the country, and poses a challenge to the distorting mirrors through which the Middle Kingdom is usually regarded. Using humour as a means of ...

Since first encountering Shanghai twenty years ago, I have been repeatedly struck by feelings of alienation not encountered elsewhere in China - an alienation rising in the city itself. Shanghai is a construct, built and rebuilt many times over, ...

The dust has settled. Cairo is overlaid with it: it's in the air, in your clothes, in the jerrybuilt housing projects, in the crumbling Islamic city, on the camera lens, but above all, in politics. President Hosni Mubarak has been in control since 1981, ...

The terrorist attacks of 26th November 2008 left a stain on Mumbai. There had been attacks and bombs before, but this time it was upon the new Mumbai, the city connected with the world - the new face that was rising out of the old stagnations, the ...

"One consequence of studying literature rather than photography is an abiding mistrust of my own discourse. Another consequence is this series, born of a continuing preoccupation with the written word and metaphor. Drawn from a series of ...

The People's Armed Police is a nationwide paramilitary force responsible for 'handling rebellion, riots, large-scale serious criminal violence, terror attacks and other social safety incidents' according to the Chinese state news agency Xinhua. In ...

In the early morning of 24 November in Geneva, an unexpected deal was announced between six world powers and Iran to limit its nuclear program. As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry stated in a 5.00 a.m. press conference, it is only the start of a ...

After months of diplomatic wrangling, recriminations and arm-twisting the main political players in Syria's brutal civil war which has been raging for almost three years, claiming the lives of well over 100,000 people, agreed to meet in Montreux on ...

Every year, the Swiss canton of Valais plays host to a series of unusual sporting events when the combats de reines (or 'queen fights') draw tens of thousands of spectators who watch massive Herens breed cows push and shove each other across a small ...

In what has been described as Africa's world war, three million people died in the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1998 and 2003. Following the signing of a peace treaty and formation of a transitional government last year, a ...

For the last 22 years, Teun Voeten has been covering wars and conflicts worldwide and has seen the whole gamut of barbaric acts humans are capable of inflicting on each other. But according to him, nothing compares to the recent drug violence in...

It was 1998, and the civil war in Sierra Leone had been raging for seven years. I had been given what I thought would be a standard assignment on child soldiers, some of whom were said to be as young as seven. No sooner had I arrived in the town ...

I first heard about New York's tunnel people in 1992 when I met Terry Williams, an ethnographer specialising in urban issues. Williams described them as 'a new class of people who have been rejected by society and became in fact invisible.' ...

Political caricature has been used for centuries by people wanting to poke fun at or discredit a maligned leader or political party. As freedom of expression has grown in rebel-controlled Libya, so too has the use of cartoon and caricature - most often ...

The readers of De Volkskrant, a Dutch daily newspaper, once voted Charleroi "the ugliest city in Europe". The town of 200,000 just 40 miles south of Brussels is notorious for its dreary housing complexes and defunct industries and is struggling with ...

In the last 25 years 4.9 million people have been forcibly displaced in Colombia's civil conflict. At the root of the violence and displacement is control - control of the local population, control of territory, control of natural resources, and ...

'Thank you for generating employment with your visit' reads a handwritten notice in blue marker pen at the exit to the big top. Not many have read that notice lately. After several weeks of rain, public apathy and just plain bad luck Mario Salazar ...

'It is very Jewish to be a shepherd', says Shaltiel, a young settler in Tekoa in the West Bank. 'When I'm with the herd, I sing and pray in order to lift myself above the animal level. When staying too long with animals, you could easily start to behave ...