Year of the Dragon

Handwritten “bye bye Spain” sign hanging from a window in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter.

In the days after deciding that Barcelona was the next stop in my little Euro trip (mostly because I had the offer of a free couch to sleep on and it lay on the way to Madrid) I consciously decided not to Google it. By now I’ve figured out that the main attractions of a city will usually fight for your attention once you get there, and after the experience in Paris of re-seeing everything I already knew so well just from the collective imaginary, I was ready to be surprised.

And surprised I was. I had no idea what to expect out of the Catalan city, other than some vague notion that I’d see some special architecture. I found a city that seemed to me physically more stunning, more decidedly unique than anything I could have imagined; yet emotionally harder to crack than I expected from a city where I had several connections and was –theoretically- fluent in the language.

The first surprise was that Barcelona was, in fact, the very first place I’ve visited where I didn’t speak the language. Though everyone speaks Spanish (or Castillian, as it should be properly called in Barcelona if you don’t want to be snapped at) every store sign and bus schedule was written in Catalan. Catalan is not just a funny kind of Spanish, as I had imagined it before, but a related yet distinct language much like Italian. It’s close enough to understand what store signs are advertising, but not nearly close enough to eavesdrop on conversations on the bus, hard as I tried.  Things will often be stubbornly translated into English rather than into Castillian.

Of course, the politics of language are just a layer of something deeper going on in Barcelona. The locals do not consider themselves Spanish, and there is a significant independence movement that is visible through the streets of the city in the form of independentist flags hanging from apartment windows (with a star on a field of blue,  like Puerto Rico’s, added to the traditional yellow and red striped Catalan flag). Both the Spanish and Colombian people that I hung out with during my time there refer to the Catalá as “them”. They are accused of being cold and closed, and though I didn’t get the chance to speak with many Catalans and get their side of the story, I did often feel that waiters and store attendants would turn dry bordering on rude once I spoke Spanish.  The only openly warm Catalan person I interacted with in my week in the city was an eighteen year old boy that was falling over drunk on the metro at four in the morning. And even then, he spoke to me only in English.  

I suppose that it’s natural that a culture that has been fighting for the survival of its identity for so many centuries (even as close as Franco’s regime, where speaking the language was actually forbidden) would become resentful of outsiders. I’m just a little sad that I didn’t really get to take much of a peek at the Barcelonés’s Barcelona, instead limiting myself to ogling gorgeous streets with hordes of tourists and hanging out with Colombian grad students come to Spain to polish their résumés with an European diploma.

Thankfully, there was much to ogle at, and I am not referring to the tanned, toned and topless women at the beach, though there were plenty of those, too. Gaudi’s work is something out of a fairytale. It’s hard not to stare at La Sagrada Familia and imagine it as the work of a giant pastry chef with too much time on his hands, and La Pedrera would fit in just fine in a Dr. Seuss story. His work is irreverently original, without seeming gimmicky or impractical for the sake of looks.  I loved it.

But I think what I liked most was that it wasn’t simply a few out-of-place works of genius sprinkled throughout an ordinary city. The non-Gaudi buildings in Barcelona were also beautiful, with great colors, and balconies, and fantastic patterns on the walls. There were plenty of sculptures and fountains, and a refreshing lack of naked cherubs and gild. It’s a walker’s city, with wide shady “ramblas”  and unending boardwalks by the Mediterranean Sea. The gothic neighborhood was a delightful maze of narrow medieval streets to get lost in along with several thousand other tourists.