The deals we make to keep our lifestyles
“The Covid-19 pandemic is the start of a new normal, from here on nothing will be the same.” I could not disagree more, although this view is common amongst those ...
The Catalan Bourgeoisie, Part 2
You have got to be careful, when talking about the Catalan bourgeoisie, to not strain your neck. This is best accomplished by never looking up. You’d be wrong to i ...
The Catalan Bourgeoisie, Part 1
The bourgeoisie, experts agree, appeared well after the Pleistocene and a short time before the Anthropocene. This is historically accurate. It is also a gross gen ...
Our streets
"Barcelona is a city where residents are emboldened to walk down the middle streets" Intrigued by what we look like to those looking in, I have spent time in the ...
Four Quartets
Ciutat Vella is sharply sectioned into four similar-sized parts, like an airline food tray. Ciutat Vella, the old city, is a permeable urban core that can be easi ...
Full of Grace
Gràcia, full of grace, is the city’s happy median, Barcelona in its most adequate state Barcelona does not really have a “best place to live”, a part of town peop ...
The Neighbourly Thing to Do
The other day, as I was gathering my laundry off the line on our terrace, I saw the man next door. He was busy with what he has been doing for the last five years, ...
Maragallades
During this past election campaign for Barcelona City Council, Esquerra Republicana mayoralty candidate Ernest Maragall insisted his political rivals make no menti ...
Something Funny in Barcelona
Pure irony proves the point They say every place has its own kind of humour, a defining trait. By their humour you shall know them—only that funniness is so specifi ...
Green Space
Looking down on Barcelona from Montjuïc or Collserola, all you see is a solid mass of buildings. Depending on your angle, the odd avenue cuts through. And maybe tha ...
Nobody Loves Gaudí – Part 2/2
Part 2: fearful unwillingness to explore medieval masonry techniques. There’s not a single Gaudí building I don’t like. For a discerning person like me that’s sayin ...
Nobody Loves Gaudí
Part 1: On the hypocrisy behind the Gaudí aura. The architecture of Antoni Gaudí is, along with the seafront, one of the few unarguable features of Barcelona. Few B ...
Walking to Barcelona
I have walked to many cities in my life, but I have never walked to Barcelona. What I mean is that I have never found myself in some outlying town, like Sant Cugat ...
Barcelona from the Air
¿Does it make sense to look at a city from a birds-eye perspective? There’s not a country in the world that hasn’t produced a tv program of images of its landscapes ...
Tourists & Andorrans
There are four kinds of foreigners in Barcelona: tourists, guiris, immigrants and Andorrans. The first are just visiting, so they sightsee. The second are foreigner ...
Mediocrity in the Middle
A Barcelona guidebook once asked me to review every museum in the city, large or small, prominent or obscure. This atypical experience (as guidebooks are usually se ...
Shibboleths | Working Class Culture
It is hard to find anything positive about a city with shrinking salaries and thinning opportunities, where the most commonly shared ideal involves a massive downsi ...
Dusk Glow in Winter
There are only two good things about ending Daylight Saving Time and going back to Standard, where the days are shorter and the nights are stronger than moonshine. ...
The Fall of Barcelona – Part III
Once, when visiting the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion with a prestigious German art critic, he looked up Montjuïc to the Palau Nacional, home to the MNAC museum, and s ...
The Fall of Barcelona – Part II
Last month I argued that the terms of a city’s identity and the basis for its eventual decline are written into its rise to fortune and fame. That the very things t ...
The Fall of Barcelona – Part I
I was working on a column called “The Fall of Barcelona”, when a pathological version of Jihadist extremism reared its head in the city, and I thought it might not ...
Why do we have to run?
Every society does irrational things unthinkingly, holding them dear and stubbornly refusing to change. When they are big things, like sending armies off to war or ...
At Home in This Residential Orgy
Barcelona is a dense accumulation of small apartments, organized into over-height apartment buildings, crammed into each available centimetre of every city block. N ...
Father, Grandpa, Patriarch | Jordi Pujol’s fall from grace
For those too young to remember Jordi Pujol in the quarter century he was President of Catalonia, it is hard to grasp the impact of his fall into disgrace. In a sin ...
Barcelona Vice: Perpetrators Who Know No Punishment
Most of us have an idea of what vice is from watching TV cop shows, where smartly-dressed detectives hang around neon-lit alleyways, trying to put an end to it. Vi ...
The Haunted City – Barcelona’s Spirits Expelled
If you’ve ever wondered why you have never felt spooked in Barcelona, the answer is simple: the city has no ghosts. This is an objective fact, and one that has to d ...
Barcelona is no longer beautiful, and its people aren’t either
One of the reasons why outsiders are so attracted to Barcelona is because Barcelona is so attracted to them. Or so they think. This has been seen by every new resid ...
Are we having fun yet? Detecting an undercurrent of un-fun chic
While most people would agree everyone likes to have fun, there is little agreement on precisely how this takes place. If you ask Barcelonans they’ll usually answer ...
The Limits of the City: Barcelona greedily gobbles up its vecinos
Most Barcelonans haven’t a clue where their city begins and where it ends, which is why a lot gets called Barcelona when it’s not. While it borders ten neighbouring ...
Barcelona, doggie heaven? Nothing could be further from the truth
With one of the highest rates of dogs per capita in Spain, you’d think Barcelona would be doggie heaven, an ideal habitat for man’s best friend. Nothing could be fu ...
Barcelona beach: Left to itself, its defiant ecosystem would probably disappear
The thin beige line of finely granulated stone separating Barcelona from the sea is what we know as the beach. This information is humbly provided for anyone under ...
The grandeur of Barça: it was forged in those losing years, not by winning
Immediately after the costly refit of FC Barcelona’s Camp Nou stadium was trumpeted last month, old-timers pulled out the history books to offer a stern warning. Af ...
A bee in the shopkeeper’s bonnet
The proverbial Barcelona botiguer, diligently manning (or womanning) the family boutique, is often championed as the last and most noble bastion of the city that wa ...
Barcelona: fleet-footed and frenetic or sluggish and slow?
If we had to put a speedometer on Barcelona, what would it show? Fleet-footed or sluggish, fast or slow? The same city that prides itself on being serious and hard- ...
The Mediterranean Diet: You can diss Gaudí, but say the food is no good and Barcelonans will think you’re a total idiot
When gastronomically vain Barcelonans are told the Mediterranean Diet was invented in California, they take it with a shrug: another case of cultural appropriation ...
Together, forever
For decades the success of the Spanish democratic transition was widely attributed to the ability of so many divergent parts to agree. Instead of digging up the pas ...
Pedagogically displeased
[quote align="left"]"The mystery is how Barcelonans can be so anxious about innovation, so quick to take up new causes, when they themselves were educated to sit st ...
Wild and common-sensical guys
[quote align="left"] Like a favourite cocktail you want to keep drinking all night, seny i rauxa goes easy on the hard stuff (the latter) while drowning in sensible ...
City of design
[quote align="left"]It does not help that tourists seem to agree, giving their highest rating when polled to the city’s architecture and urban spaceLong-time Barcel ...
Part I. Eixamplism
“To every outworn shibboleth...he clung with fanatic tenacity.” Robert Boothby A shibboleth, in its original biblical use, refers to a variation in pronunciation us ...