In this talk I want to give a gentle introduction to parapolar spaces. These are are axiomatically defined point-line geometries, introduced by Cooperstein in the 70ies to capture the behaviour of the Grassmannians of spherical buildings. Actually, all interesting known examples arise from buildings (not necessarily spherical). I will talk about some results on how to recognise a parapolar space given local information, starting from some graph related examples, and ending with an application in the Freudenthal-Tits magic square.
