Well, he hasn't tweeted about it yet. He probably doesn't know where it is.
Yeah, most likely.
I've been in the region 2 or 3 times already, it really is a beautiful place. I hope things won't get worse there.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41461032
If they did not wish to be their own independent state before they probably do now! It's hard to imagine a country like Spain using such violence to stop people from voting in this day. It's so bizarre. Even if the people had voted "yes" it doesn't mean they would instantly become independent.
Exactely!
I've heard people don't actually hate spain nor they don't want to be spanish anymore.
It's more about the central government that treats catalunya pretty badly, so people got angry, and some wanting to leave. And then, by doing some raids/treating people even worse, more and more people jumped on the indepenence train. Now with how things went today, I'm pretty sure even more will follow because they're angry.
I'm pretty sure they could have solved the situation with talks & perhaps giving them partwise independence (without them being their own country)...but yeah we'll see what happens now.
The situation here is pretty messed up. Ten years ago, the independence movement was almost non-existent. We voted an updated version of our autonomy statute, aproved by qualified majority in the Congress. But then Rajoy's party, Partido Popular (people's party, the successor of francoist party Alianza Popular - people's alliance) took that Statute and took it to court, getting the Constitutional Court, controlled by pro-PP judges, to shave important bits out of it, like the mention of Catalunya as a nation of its own inside Spain. That got the catalans pretty angry. Later, the then Catalan president, Artur Mas, asked for a better financial deal for Catalunya, similar to the one the Basque Country already enjoyed, a deal to end the tense relationship between Madrid and Barcelona. Rajoy didn't even want to talk about it. Catalans got angrier because Catalunya gives a lot of money to Spain in taxes, but doesn't see any major investments from the state to the region. To give you an example, the first high velocity train in Spain connected Madrid and Seville, ignoring Barcelona, the second most populated city, with the fastest growing airport and one of the most important ports -a big logistics mistake, right? Following that, Mas attempted to call the catalans to vote about their future inside Spain. It was banned by Rajoy's government. Mas then tried to turn the referendum into an informal query to smooth the tension, but he nonetheless was taken to court and inhabilited. His successor, Puigdemont tried to open a dialogue with the central government about Catalunya's future, but it was, again, ignored and ridiculed. Every year, more than a million people gather to ask for their right to vote about their future, and the government has always said it's just "a minority". Yesterday, More than 2.2 million people voted (out of 5.5 million able voters) even after Madrid sent thousands of police and paramilitary to the region, but today Rajoy denied both the referendum and the policial charges against unarmed, peacefull civilians. He even got the gall to call it all a "manipulation" from the Catalan government. I was there. I was, like many others, at the door of one of the poll stations when the police came, to stop them from robbing our right to vote. I got away unscathed, but almost a thousand people were not so lucky.