If you’re going to Barcelona, I’m not sure I can help you – even though I recently spent three and a half days in the capital of Catalonia, saw the sights and wandered around extensively. Then again, if you’re going to Barcelona, you probably don’t need my help. Even beyond the usual array of Rough Guides and Lonely Planets, almost everyone I spoke to before leaving Cyprus – even those people who never went anywhere, or so I thought – turned out to have been to Barcelona at some point in the past 10 years. The place is a tourist magnet (it got seven million visitors in 2007!) catering, as they say, to all tastes. All I can do is add my small account to the millions of other brief impressions – even though it won’t be very helpful.
It’s not that my holiday was disastrous; far from it. It’s just that my account isn’t typical, because most people focus on the various attractions of Barcelona. There are beaches – more for lounging than swimming, though I saw locals do both – there are cathedrals, there are tapas bars and seafood places. Above all, there are the wildly imaginative buildings (notably La Pedrera and La Sagrada Familia) designed by architect Antonio Gaudi. Most visitors, quite reasonably, will tell you about these attractions – but my own visit, despite my best intentions, was quickly overwhelmed by two other things: rain and tourists.
I never really thought about the weather, coming from Cyprus where early May (especially this year) is practically summer. But Barcelona – I later found out – gets an average of eight ‘wet days’ in May: out of my three and a half days, it rained constantly for two and a half. Now, I know what you must be thinking: ‘Stop whining about a few raindrops! You’re in Barcelona, just enjoy it!’. Yes – but a city break is a very special kind of holiday, especially for the single (or at least solitary) traveller. Cities must be walked, and walked constantly. You can’t feel the pulse of a city till you walk its streets, duck into alleys, browse market stalls and second-hand shops, follow surprising sounds and smells to find things you never expected. Rain interferes with all that. I walked, of course, but walking is less of a pleasure when your jacket is sodden and you keep stepping in puddles. And of course the solitary traveller has to keep moving. You can’t sit for hours in a café, reading a book and waiting for the rain to stop – or you can, but it feels a bit pathetic.
In between the rain, I visited the sights of Barcelona; which is where the tourists come in. Maybe it’s because I haven’t been to a touristy place in years, and much has changed during those years – namely, technology. Tourists in famous attractions used to stand around, looking sheepish and a little bit bored – but now they have mobile phones and cameras, and their goal in life is to use them as often as possible. It’s like tourists have become empowered. They don’t even bother to look around anymore, just bring out their mobiles and line up the shot. The less ambitious take photos of their kids and spouses, the more artistic – those who fancy themselves as photographers – focus on interesting lines and unusual angles. And so many photos! What do they plan to do with all those photos? Bore the folks back home? Put them on Facebook? In the basement of Palau Guell – the townhouse Gaudi built for his rich patron – they showed us a film about the architect, and the guy next to me actually started filming the film! Never mind that you can’t pay attention to a film (or anything, really) when you’re busy preserving it for future generations.
Rain and tourists, tourists and rain. Rain coming down on the pavements, tourists thronging inside La Pedrera – a surreal, Dr. Seuss-like apartment block with wavy lines that looks like it’s made out of cheese – and disrupting the calm of the great vaulted Cathedral. Barcelona’s churches tend to be quite bare beneath their Gothic ceilings, not necessarily by design but because many were gutted by anarchists in the 1930s – just like the basement of the Palau Guell (where they showed us that film) was used by police to torture political prisoners during the Civil War. There’s a sometimes dark past to Barcelona, just like you can sense a quieter town (the rather drab industrial town it used to be before the big Olympic clean-up in the 1990s) beneath the tourist magnet. Gaudi’s flights of fancy are remarkable – the roof of La Pedrera is studded (for no good reason) with statues of helmeted knights who allegedly inspired the storm-troopers in Star Wars – but his buildings are hardly typical of the grand, rather staid central streets. Barcelona is a place where you can go into a bar or coffee shop and order a “bikini” – but what you actually get is a toasted ham-and-cheese sandwich.
I know because I ordered a “bikini”, just like I visited the Museum of Erotica and walked (when the rain let up slightly) down La Rambla, an all-human-life-is-here extravaganza lined with entertainers, limb-less beggars, people pretending to be statues, and stalls selling dozens of small animals – rabbits, iguanas, ferrets – among other delights. I can see how Barcelona could be lovely, in better weather. You can lounge on the beach, idle in parks, go from cathedrals to markets. You can eat at state-of-the-art restaurants (El Bulli, probably the world’s top eatery, is just down the road) or Meson David, a cantina of stunning no-frills authenticity where the lunchtime menu – €8.50 – includes two courses and a long narrow bottle of house red. I had noodle soup, sausage with white beans, plus the house special of pulpo (octopus) and potatoes, the whole thing slathered in paprika. Perfect food for walking in the rain all day.
You can even feel unique, if you try hard enough. There are seven million tourists, but they all carry the same few guidebooks – as I found out on my last night when I walked into a modest restaurant called Norbaltic and caused a sensation by being a foreigner looking for food. On the verge of panic, the portly senora called for someone to communicate with me – ignoring my eloquent sign-language – and a young, rather fey chap appeared, introducing himself as an English-speaking “friend of the family”. This was ‘Tazko’ – actually Ramon but Tazko (he explained) was his pseudonym, the ‘Taz’ being short for ‘Tasmania’. Tazko spent half the night at my table, talking of the year he spent in Australia (though not Tasmania), the tapas – actually pintxos, the Basque equivalent – lined up on the bar, and of course the changing face of Barcelona.
It’s become less authentic, he lamented. People are always too busy, trying to act European. They’re even on the point of banning bullfights, albeit for political reasons (emphasising Catalan over Spanish). All this and more Tazko told me, with the candour people have when talking to a stranger – especially that rare thing, a stranger who speaks English. Somewhere in the city, the other seven million strangers were (I assume) having similar experiences. Outside, it had finally stopped raining.
