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On Wednesday, Spain became the first European country to partly suspend immunizations because of a lack of doses. It did so first in Madrid, for two weeks, and said that Catalonia, the northeastern region that includes Barcelona, could soon follow.

It is unclear when the supply might improve.

Last week, the European Union’s executive branch, the European Commission, set a goal of having 70 percent of its population inoculated by this summer. Just days later, the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, pronounced that “difficult.”

Tons of dead fish have washed ashore as the once-crystalline waters became choked with algae.

But they agree that nitrate-filled runoffs from fertilizers from nearby farms have heavily damaged the waters where oysters and sea-horses used to thrive

He also put some of the blame on local politicians, accusing them of long downplaying the contamination

Taken together, they chronicle the shifting lenses through which Spain’s Catholics saw the country’s Jewish population between 1285 and 1492. As the title suggests, the show also explores how, as time went on, Catholic Spain propagated the otherness of its Jewish inhabitants as a means to affirm, forge and galvanise a Christian identity. “The relationship between the Christian and Jewish communities in the middle ages is one of the key themes in the history of our country,” said Miguel Falomir, director of the Prado. “If ever there was an exhibition that showed how vividly and eloquently images can be used, then this is it.”

Noble portrayals of Old Testament prophets give way to depictions of Jews as wilfully blind – and often literally blindfolded – before the divinity of Christ. By the late 13th century, something more sinister is under way: an illuminated parchment created around 1280 shows a Jew stealing an icon of the Virgin Mary in Constantinople and dropping it into a latrine. The offending Jew is killed by the devil, but the icon survives its fetid dip and remains fragrant, thereby prompting the local Jewish community to convert to Catholicism.

Fast forward 100 years and an altarpiece shows a Jew – who has been given a communion wafer by a Christian woman hoping to get back her pawned dress – profaning the bleeding, if miraculously resilient, host. According to the exhibition’s curator, Joan Molina, head of Spanish Gothic art at the Prado, the increasingly “militant and virulent” brushstrokes came to mirror the beatings, hackings and burnings.