Barcelona
The complete Barcelona gig guide plus our pick of the latest albums & singles.
Introduction
According to every poll worth its clipboard, Barcelona is the European city best loved by visitors, and to the current generation of cultural dilettantes and easyJetsetters it is almost impossible to imagine that it wasn’t ever thus.
This is the city’s triumph, and its own self-assurance is fortified with the quiet knowledge of how it got here. Over the centuries it has been buffeted by invading forces, fleeced by trade restrictions and strangled by autocratic central governments – and every time has bounced back prouder and more audacious. After the ‘grey years’, the interminable period between the end of the civil war and Franco’s dying breath, there was a huge zest for change, to move on to a new era. It stoked the desire to transform the city itself, while the Olympic bid and then the Games themselves provided extra incentive, not to mention cash.
The finest architects and urban planners were persuaded to take part in this vision. The axis upon which the project spun was the idea to ‘turn Barcelona around’ to face the sea, creating whole swathes of beach from virtual wasteland. Ugly high-rises flung up during the Franco regime were pulled down, derelict blocks razed to provide open spaces and parkland, and world-class artists and sculptors – Roy Lichtenstein, James Turrell, Claes Oldenburg and Eduardo Chillida among them -– commissioned to brighten up street corners. Along with the creation of the new Barcelona in bricks and mortar went the promotion of Barcelona-as-concept, a seductive cocktail of architecture, imagination, tradition, style, nightlife and primary colours.
Helped, in large part, by the legacy of Gaudí and the other Modernistes, which provided the city with a unique foundation both architecturally and in spirit, this was perhaps the most spectacular, and certainly the most deliberate, of Barcelona’s reinventions; it succeeded in large part because this image of creativity and vivacity simply fitted well with an idea of the city already held by many of its citizens. Thrown into the mix were the core values of nationalist pride and a delight in traditional ways, from dancing the sardana in front of the cathedral, to wheeling out the papier mâché giants at the first hint of a celebration.
Barcelona’s love of eccentricity had already brought about a wealth of quirky museums (such as those devoted to shoes, perfume, sewers, funeral carriages and mechanical toys), to which more were added. Its handsome but grimy façades were buffed up, its streets renamed and its churches restored. To see it nowadays it’s as if the drab decades were just a collective bad dream.
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27 Comments
¡Gracias amigos! Posted on Mar 09 2008 12:30
Thanks Posted on Jan 19 2008 20:21
Lets get back to the subject eh! Posted on Jan 10 2008 22:11
CERVESA, SI US PLAU!!!
Remember that Catalonia is not Spain, please. Posted on Jan 09 2008 11:54
I welcome you all to come visit our (your) city!
Don't be like the Glasgow fans who got sooo drunk that they were annoying! Posted on Jan 04 2008 18:47
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