It’s dawn at La Sagrada Familia. As Antoni Gaudi’s architectural masterpiece towers overhead, birds fly through the towers and portals of the church’s elaborate facade. Still jet-lagged from my California flight, I’m in Barcelona, Spain, catching the beginning of the light with Benjamin Lind of Humboldt Seed Company.
We’re standing in front of the Sagrada’s east-facing Nativity Facade—which depicts the birth of Jesus and the natural world—joking that it’s “t-minus five days until Spannabis,” one of the largest cannabis seed marketplaces on the planet. Mary and Joseph are placed within natural shapes that resemble caves, joined by intricate depictions of flora and fauna. The elaborate scene cascades down into a tiny baby Jesus above the church’s main door. I’m getting lost in the details of the architecture as my morning joint sets in. A sunbeam hits the cypress tree within the spires.
“I think Spannabis might be the largest seed event in the world of any type of seed,” Lind says. “Can you imagine people going this crazy over like corn seeds and soybeans?”
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In the coming days, Lind and the Humboldt Seed Company will join the flurry by selling cannabis seeds at Spannabis, a major international gathering that has been held in Barcelona since 2002.
Cannabis in Spain exists in a legal gray area; while it cannot be commercially grown or sold, it can be consumed in private spaces. Catalonia—an autonomous region of Spain that includes Barcelona as its capital city—has more liberal cannabis laws than other places in the country, resulting in the establishment of hundreds of private, non-profit social clubs where cannabis can be purchased and enjoyed. New Frontier Data reports that “sales through clubs in Spain totaled an estimated $431 million in 2019 (the year prior to COVID-19 closures and shutdowns), which would mark it as the third-largest national market behind the U.S. and Canada should it become fully legalized and regulated.”
Lind describes his friends and crew as bringing a “wave of genetics from California crashing onto the European seed scene.”
In recent months, Lind has surfed the globe—visiting places like Uruguay, Morocco, Germany, Antigua, and Saint Vincent—to work on breeding projects to preserve local cannabis culture by protecting the work of generational cannabis farmers.
“Cannabis is culture,” Lind says as dawn breaks over Barcelona. “Yes, preserving the genetics is a component of that, but preserving the culture, for me, is equally valuable. There’s such an oral tradition with cannabis because it was so stigmatized for so long that you couldn’t write it down…
“And so you go to these little nooks and crannies around the world where these people for generations—and in the case of Morocco, for like, literally millennia, for thousands of years—they have been preserving and developing a culture around cannabis.”
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As much as Spannabis is a three-day seed marketplace, it’s also a celebration of the cannabis lifestyle worldwide. Attendees at the 2025 event included people from 50 different nations.
Each year, Spannabis germinates gatherings of people devoted to enjoying the essence of a cannabis flower—hash in all forms—in the gray area of social smoking clubs located throughout the city. Within these members-only clubs, lighting up a joint of all cannabis flower will expose you as a tourist; a spliff of hash mixed with tobacco is the traditional smoke. Spain is geographically near Morocco, and the hash scene here has been established since the 1970s.
“The modern hash-making world learned a ton from Morocco, but no one’s writing about it or talking about it there,” Lind says. “What I see right now is this global tide of legalization, and I feel that a lot of people are getting displaced from it because big money interests are moving in.”
The conversation of scale comes into focus as the Sagrada, the tallest church in the world, looms in front of us.
“We are applying modern breeding techniques to these landrace genetics that already perform really well down here,” Lind says in a video blog documenting the Antigua trip. “And what that’s allowing is traditional farmers, without a ton of infrastructure or a ton of capital, to be able to now compete in this licensed market where you have, you know, big investors coming down, big greenhouses, big Smart Pots, just big everything, and the local folks can’t compete with that.”
Small, But Mighty
Flash forward a few days, and I’m in the Humboldt Seed Company’s European office in Barcelona. The California-based team has assembled before Spannabis to finish packing some of the seeds for Northern California brand partners—Huckleberry Hill Farms, Tangled Roots, and Mendo Dope Farms—that they’ve brought into the fold to sell out of their booth at the show. The energy is electric, with a film crew that’s arrived from Colombia, Home Grow TV, documenting the prep work.
Cannabis seeds might be small, but their sale is a big business. Organizers reported that this year’s Spannabis brought in more than eight million euros to the local economy.
In one corner of the room, the Humboldt team is calibrating a machine to count cannabis seeds. These types of automatic counting machines are typically used to count other tiny things of great value, like microchips or diamonds.
“There are not many things that are valuable enough to sell individually.” Nathaniel Pennington, Humboldt’s CEO, tells me.
Humbolt’s seeds weigh .018 grams on average and were sold at Spannabis for ten euros each.
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Most agricultural seeds—think tomatoes—are sold by their weight, not by how many seeds are in the pack. No one is “tripping if they bought a $4 pack of tomato seeds whether they got 21 or 18 or however many are in there,” Pennington says.
Due to cannabis prohibitions across the world, cannabis seeds are far more valuable in their relative rarity and are priced by the number in a pack, each of which will hopefully grow into a mighty cannabis plant. At the Humboldt Seed Company’s 2025 Spannabis booth, three packs were 30 euros, and five packs were 50 euros.
“There are a lot of seed companies that charge a lot more than we do, so I would have a very hard time figuring out how their seeds are quote-unquote better,” Pennington says. “You know, there’s wine out there that is $500 a bottle, but these guys aren’t 5,000-year-old vineyards making things in a rigorous traditional way. They’ve just so happened to, let’s say, have a video with Wiz Khalifa.”
The Bigger the Better?
On the morning of the first day of Spannabis, I smoke a joint of a Barcelona-grown HSC strain, Garlic Budder, with Pennington and noted cannabis cultivation expert Ed Rosenthal on a Spanish rooftop deck.
“Spannabis is a ride,” Rosenthal says.
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Rosenthal, now 80 years old, has been a major player in the international cannabis scene since the 1970s. His main spark these days has been promoting a method of growing cannabis for concentrates with a close-planting technique designed to reduce labor.
“The big thing is I have these cultivation methods that people aren’t using that I’m advocating, and it’s very difficult to get people to even try them—like it’s too weird,” he says.
Known for his grow books, Rosenthal is promoting cultivating small cannabis plants that are brought into flower before their vegetative stage can begin. With this method, the plants do not start branching but grow as single stalks of buds.
“We planted these autoflowers very close together, less than one foot apart,” Rosenthal explains of a project that he consulted on in Ottawa, Canada. “Usually, people like a lot of space between plants and everything; my thought is, if we have the right plants, they’ll shoot up rather than spread out.”
He says the buds are the same as those grown on larger full-season cannabis plants, and this method of growing means a quicker turnover, resulting in additional harvests.
Why have his methods not been adopted? He says it’s all ego. People want to show they grew the biggest plants. But at one of the largest cannabis seed marketplaces in the world, the man known as the “Guru of Ganja” is promoting that bigger isn’t always better.
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A Cultural Cross
At Spannabis, there are hundreds of seed vendors, which makes it challenging to suss out which companies are legit. Halle Pennington, who works as a product executive at Humboldt Seed Company alongside her dad, explains that there is a difference between creating a genuinely new cannabis strain and bringing two types of cannabis together to create a cross. In order to stabilize the genetic qualities of new strains, cannabis breeders work lines through generations. It’s a process that takes years.
“You would never hear a dog breeder say, ‘I just created a new dog,’” Halle explains.
Like the Banksy museum in Barcelona, which showcases recreations of the street artist’s work, there are a lot of “fakes” on the Spannabis floor. Unstabilized seed crosses result in unpredictable plants, meaning you could get five vastly different plants from a pack of five seeds.
Despite the challenges, finding a winning seed pack is a fun adventure, and gathering with the worldwide cannabis community in one place is an invigorating social smoking scene.
“I think this international gathering is crucial for the cannabis community as a whole because in each of our cultures, we have a different approach to cannabis, and it’s that diversity of perspective and of thought that pushes innovation,” Dank Duchess, a New York-based hash educator, tells me.
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Victor, who lives in Barcelona and was attending his 15th Spannabis, shares a bit of his Tangie hash with me in the smoking circle. I feel a rush from the tobacco and hash combination in the spliff as it begins to rain.
Those who attended the 2025 Spannabis—reportedly the last to be held in Barcelona—came to gather seeds and embrace the customs and traditions of cannabis culture in Spain.
“People here, they always want to smoke hash; it’s a cultural thing,” Victor says.
International gatherings like Spannabis make it clear that the roots of the cannabis plant will continue to spread across the globe. With the closing of Spannabis in Barcelona, Duchess says she’s sad to see the end of an event with so much presence and history but also hopeful for what comes next.
“Now we have to look at other places, we’ve got Colombia, we’ve got Brazil,” Duchess says. “Germany! We’re talking as legal as legal gets, and right in your face is Germany, so it’s a good chance that a lot of these same people, we will see them at Mary Jane Berlin, and we will continue that tradition of sharing and really pushing our betterment within cannabis and hashish culture.”
*This article was submitted by a guest contributor. The author is solely responsible for the content.