Barcelona, twelve years later

How is it possible that we are only two weeks away from the end of our adventure? With this snowballing threat of reality rushing ever closer, we boarded a plane from Venice to Barcelona on June 28, 2015. I couldn't quite believe my good luck in returning to Spain after twelve years, and was so excited I naively ignored the weather forecasts. My return to Europe has heralded a heat wave that approaches the severity of what the continent experienced the last time I was here, in the summer of 2003. That summer, while I sat blithely in my Florentine apartment in my underwear crafting top level dance moves with my flatmates, people were dying by the thousands. We had no idea it was that serious since we only watched MTV, and only managed to hydrate ourselves with cheap cocktails and the occasional watermelon.  

exhibit A: sweating and drinking in 2003

exhibit B: erin and a watermelon in 2003

Sally and I are much more aware and prepared this time around. However, there is just no way to avoid a long hot walk from the bus stop with your 30lb "I packed so light!" backpack. We stayed at the Rodamon Barcelona Hostel off of tres chic Passeig de Gracia, quite close to Gaudis two outrageous townhomes, Battlo and Pedrera. And although the temps were bordering on 95F, I'd promised Sally a rare treat in Spain: bagels. Twelve years ago I visited Barcelona with a raucous band of friends from my study abroad program in Sevilla. We were also known to walk endlessly, but in Barcelona we found a bagel shop and parked ourselves there for two, yes two meals. Sally would have sold all her belongings for a good bagel at that point, so we found the shop online, got some sketchy directions and headed straight over. Like I said, we aren't museum fanatics.

 

Me the Sevillanas at La Pedrera, 2002

The good news is that the bagel shop is still there...the bad news is that it was not open, per internet promises, and Sally clung to the metal cage the street wailing for her lost love. Perhaps she wasn't quite so dramatic, but only because we made a beeline to a pizza shop across the plaza.

*Ed. Note: I forgot to bring my camera for this whole day. Here is a stock photo depicting Sally’s reaction: 

Now full of her second favorite food, we slowly made our way up to Parc Guell, another Gaudi project. On the way we heard 50s music in the streets of Gracia, and followed it to a plaza where a spontaneous swing dance party was taking place! We watched the dancing and enjoyed the music for a little while before trudging on. In the interim between my visits to Parc Guell, Barcelona wised up to the money-making opportunity they had, and began charge for access to the architecturally developed areas of the park.  Eight euros was a bit dear for our cheapskate traveling goals, so we traipsed through all the free parts of the park and eyeballed the rich people sitting on benches in the paid access part.

After some quality people watching in the park, we descended, ate popsicles, and hiked across town to La Rambla. This boulevard falls under the category of “you must see this, even if you don’t know why.” La Rambla was historically a central trading, meeting and market place, and religious center, but now it is really just an outrageous tourist trap. We thought we might sit for an afternoon liter of beer, but upon seeing the TEN EURO price tag at each of the outdoor restaurants, we ran screaming down the road to the waterfront.  The waterfront is rather commercial as well, complemented by a towering monument to Christopher Columbus, whom Barcelona claimed as their own, and are still apparently not embarrassed by that completely unsubstantiated claim.  Anyway, I tease, but Barcelona has plenty of lovely sights that were new to me entirely, and which we discovered our second day on (you guessed it) our Sandeman Free City Tour.

The general region of Barcelona and Tarragona were settled by the Phoenicians in early 500 BC, though there may have been small tribes living there when the Phoenicians arrived. Three hundred years later the Romans came to Spain’s east coast and set up Barcelona as a functional city, though still very small. The tour started in the Gothic Quarter, which was built by the invading Visigoths of the mid-sixth century AD but still has walls from that Roman period. 

  

We headed to the Call Judeu, where we learned that Barcelona’s first synagogue was built in approximately the third century BC, the remnants of which can still be seen in the Jewish Quarter of Barcelona. We didn’t go in the old synagogue on our tour, but read more about it here and see some neat photos! For all the religious tolerance during the Roman period, the Jewish story takes a predictably tragic turn in the Dark Ages, when the community was able to avoid the Black Death due to their hygiene practices and of course the fact that the Christians had walled them into their own ghetto and thus didn’t come into frequent contact with the infected. Obviously that meant they were somehow responsible for the plague. Then of course Jews lived through a series of forced conversions to Christianity, culminating in the Spanish Inquisition in the late 15th century. Traveling through Europe really is a history of how terrible humanity has been to Jewish populations, geez.

The most important thing to know about Barcelona is that it maintains a fierce sense of independence from Spain, maintaining that it should be a separate nation. There are a few reasons for this, so I’ll try to outline them briefly.

First of all, Barcelona is the capital of Catalunya, a province that became part of the territories belonging to the Crown of Aragon in the 12th century. Barcelona would have been the western-most part of that territory, as it covered both sides of the Mediterranean. So yes, nearly 1,000 years ago Barcelona was independent. I’m not sure that’s a legitimate claim to sovereignty now, but let’s go on.

Second, the most understandable reason separatists hate Spain is that under Franco’s fascist leadership (1936-1978), Barcelona was shockingly oppressed. Franco believed in one Spain, and squashed any displays of regional pride, language, culture, and leadership.  Not only did Franco set up puppet courts to try citizens for falsified crimes (then execute them), he invited his fascist friend Mussolini to test out his bombs on the city, which he did in 1938. And it is troubling that still Spain doesn’t decry these atrocities as vociferously as it should. And I know 1978 isn’t terribly far in the past, but I still think there can be a balance of provincial autonomy while sharing in the greater nation of Spain for international prominence and stability. 

Lastly, the ugly side of Barcelona’s independent streak: rumor has it that they think they are better than the rest of Spain. They believe they are smarter, financially stronger, and ultimately more European than their campesino countrymen. They pay more taxes than other provinces but receive the same benefits as those lazy Andalusians, and are not equally represented in the central government. Taxes and representation, that is a call to independence that any US citizen can understand. I think the regional bigotry is pretty harsh, but then I’m from Northern Virginia, an area that would also like to separate itself from the rest of its commonwealth.  I suppose I just think that it is better to try to change Spain’s political leanings from within than to write off the country as a whole. 

I’m sure what I’ve boiled that argument down to is grossly insufficient, but I’ve got to move this post along, so please forgive me.

When the free tour ended, Sally and I went to the meeting point for the Gaudi and Modernism tour, which covered a much different Barcelona experience. The tour didn’t enter any of the buildings we learned about, but gave us a good overview of important architectural works in Barcelona. The Modernisme era was Barcelona’s answer to Art Nouveau in France, a twenty year period at the turn of the 20th century that sought creativity, nature represented through architecture, and a rejection of the bourgeoisie. Ultimately, of course, the bourgeoisie would appropriate the style and end the movement. Our first stop was the Palau de la Musica Catalan designed by Lluís Domènech i Montaner in 1905. It is still a functioning music hall today, with a spectacular interior dominated by a stained glass ceiling representing the sun in the sky (here’s a photo on wikipedia). We went on to see a number of other buildings including Casa Battlo, Antoni Gaudi’s homage to Barcelona’s patron saint, St. George, La Pedrera, his last completed project before his death, and finally La Sagrada Familia, which he worked on until his tragic death in 1926 (hit by a street tram, then left in the road for hours because passersby thought he was a vagrant). 

A note about La Sagrada Familia: this cathedral is in its 135th year of construction. That sounds ridiculous until you realize that Notre Dame de Paris took 182 years to build initially and has been under constant renovation since the 1300s, and that Brussels Cathedral of St. Michael took a cool 900+ years to finish. So all in all, La Sagrada Familia is right on track. Now, that doesn’t mean I want to pay 20 Euros a second time to see a still unfinished building. Still, in 12 years I can see a difference from the outside. And a follow-up note: while this cathedral was originally designed in its entirety by Gaudi, his original plans were lost in a fire set by Catalan anarchists in the early 1900s, so what is being built today is perhaps based off of his original design as remembered by architects of the time who saw the plan. I don’t know, for some reason I am just not a fan of this “big deal” tourist site. Call me when it’s finished. 

2003

 

2015

Okay you guys, I know this is a LOT about just Barcelona. Here are some pretty photos of Catalan street art and then me with my brother Mario who lives and studies in Barcelona and with whom Sally and I had tapas on our last night in town! The next morning we all met up again and went to the beach for a few hours, but I have no photos of that. I could tell you all about how Barcelona got its beaches, but at some point we are all going to die from old age, so let’s just move to Sevilla.