Ahh, Barcelona.
If I’d heard about ye earlier, I would have visited you before. Much before! But
thank God, I got to you when I did because at least I know I can always go
back.
And when would I
go back? The year 2026, of course, because that’s the centenary of architect
Antonio Gaudi’s birth and the year when his apocalyptic vision will finally
become a reality carved in stone.
I’m referring to
the “Sagrada Familia,” the stupendous cathedral now nearing completion in the
Eixample District, which it looms over like a stone colossus and has been
variously described as divine, surrealistic, loopy and the first Gothic
cathedral designed under LSD.
Trust me, you
have to see it for yourself and you’ll come up with your own adjectives.
 |
| Sagrada Familia |
In a city where
architecture is king and Gaudi is often regarded as king of its many famous
architects, the only people that could possibly not enjoy it would be the blind
and what a tragedy that would be for them. It’s Barcelona where the
ostentatiously, decorative baroque style reaches its epitome with its opulent
ornamentation, soaring columns and gilded statues. In our part of the world,
where everything is built as functional and cheap as possible, you just don’t
see architecture that is beautiful for beauty’s sake. And I tell you, it can reduce a sensitive soul
to tears. But Barcelona is also filled with classic, neo-classic and
mind-blowing examples of modern architecture that would look right at home in
New York or Dubai.
And I haven’t
even mentioned the “Modernisme Movement”
of the late 1890s and early 1900s that Gaudi and his fellow Catalan architects
largely invented featuring buildings with sensuous curves, undulating facades
and ventilation shafts disguised to look like flowers. All right, enough! You
just have to go there and see for yourself.
While in the
capital of Catalonia and the second largest city in Spain, you also can’t avoid
its historic legacy including the crumbling Roman walls left in the narrow
streets of the Gothic or “Gotico” District, the soaring Mirador de Colon
(Christopher Columbus column), the Picasso Museum and Catalunya Square at the
head of “La Rambla,” Barcelona’s famous market and shopping street that has
thrilled and entertained visitors from Medieval times
.
After many years
ago, reading George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia,” a paean to the Spanish
Civil War and the carnage it caused, I spent one of my most interesting days in
Barcelona when I rented a three-speed bike for the day and spent eight hours
exploring the city on my own. I slowly wended my way out of the winding Gotico,
cruised by the spectacular and gritty waterfront district and finally found
myself pedaling up leafy boulevards past Parc Guell, which is adorned by more of
Gaudi’s ceramic sculptures, and to the top of a pine-covered promontory a
thousand feet above the sprawling city. To my amazement, I found myself in a
somewhat unkempt park crowned with some crumbling, concrete bunkers that were an
artillery battery during the civil war and later a squatters’ settlement after
the war until all the squatters were moved out in the late 1990s and the park
created.
The Republican
forces had dug themselves deep into the rock, carving out tunnels and
underground dormitories where they lived while the war raged around them,
including Mussolini’s aerial bombing which served as a “practice run” for the
Second World War. It gave me a spooky feeling to be doing this and put me in a
very reflective mood about war and its tragic
vicissitudes.
And then I
noticed the most amazing thing.
Some of the
steps leading into the tunnels and the tunnel floors themselves were covered
with a rainbow of decorative tiles of many colours. “Decorating a bunker while
fighting a war,” I thought to myself. “What kind of people would do such a
thing?”
In all honesty,
I don’t know if it was the civil war fighters or the squatters that laid the
tiles down. But all I can say is Barcelona, and the Catalan people that inhabit
it, are remarkable examples of the human spirit.
I strongly
recommend going there and seeing for yourself.
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