CHAPTER ONE
The Color of a Dog 
Running Away
t is possible, some days, to see the whole of Barcelona with your 
feet on the ground. The vantage point is the old funfair on the 
Collserola massif behind the city, known as Tibidabo. Its odd name 
comes from the Latin phrase meaning "I will give you": words spoken 
by the devil to Jesus Christ when he took him up on a mountain and 
showed him the estates of the world in their entire and seductive vanity. 
Jesus refused the offer; the modern visitor need not. When the weather 
is wrong and a dome of heat hangs over Barcelona, pressing the exhaust 
gases of its cars down into a brown smog that stretches out to sea, with 
only a few modern skyscrapers and the towers of Antoni Gaudi's church 
of the Sagrada Familia, like drippy wax candles, piercing the murk, it 
is a depressing sight. But then the next morning a wind will spring up 
and carry the smirched air away, and the whole city looks washed, 
virginal, new in the sunlight.
Barcelona is really three cities, sharply distinct in character, the 
newest enclosing the older, in which the oldest is set. On the perimeter, 
laced with ribbons of freeway, are the industrial suburbs that grew up 
in the post-1945 years of the Franco dictatorship; they are the products 
of unconstrained, unplanned growth in the 195os and 196os, stretching 
south to the Llobregat and north to the Besos rivers-a sprawl of factories 
and polygons, housing blocks for the hundreds of thousands of migrant 
workers who flooded Barcelona and decisively changed its social mix. 
Inside that is the big nineteenth-century grid of the Eixample, or En-
largement, which occupies the coastal plain where the massif breaks 
away and slopes down to the Mediterranean: the New City, a repetitive 
carpet of squares with chamfered corners, slit by larger avenues, all laid
out on paper in 1859 and mostly filled in by 1 9 1 o. Then, inside that, 
where the grid meets the bay, you see the regular march of units break 
up, bunch into confusion, and become an irregular cell cluster from 
which older-looking protrusions rise: old square towers, Gothic peaks. 
This is the Old City, the Barri Gotic, or Gothic Quarter. To the right 
of it, the mountain of Montjuic rises. Beyond Montjuic lies the flat plane 
of the Mediterranean, silky, blue, and glittering. Inland ridge, plain, 
mountain, sea: the elements from which the city's life was shaped.
I became a Barcelona enthusiast, as near as I can recall, in the spring 
of 1966. I hardly knew a word of Spanish, let alone Catalan, but I went 
there for the oblique reason that I was fanatically keen on George Orwell 
and wanted to see the place to which he had paid his homage-the one 
city in Europe about which that insular Englishman felt moved to write 
with wholehearted affection. I did have one Catalan friend, met in Lon-
don, who turned out to be my key to the city: one of the last of its 
dandies, the sculptor Xavier Corber6, a wiry bantam of a man with a 
bladelike gypsy nose, a sharp cackling sense of humor, and an aptitude 
for carving marble into refined shells, wings, and demilunes. Corbero's 
ambition, which he shared with a number of young Catalans-writers, 
economists, doctors, architects, embryo politicians-was to help Bar-
celona recapture some of the luster it had a half century before their 
birth, back in the 188os: a moment forgotten, in 1966, by everyone but 
the Catalans themselves.
This seemed to deter neither Corber6 nor his friends. He lived in a 
dark rambling masia, or farmhouse, preserved along with the rest of a 
rural lane, south of the city in Esplugues de Llobregat. Esplugues means 
"caves," and indeed the place seemed riddled with catacombs dating 
back to Roman times; Corber6 kept thousands of bottles of excellent 
wine in them, not racked but dumped in heaps, the labels half-obliterated 
by mold and rats. In this labyrinth, one was apt to lose track of time 
and place alike, given the Spanish hours and a floating population of 
polyglot houseguests, but most mornings I would manage to lurch out 
into the white-gold coastal light like a disoriented bat and head for the 
city, there to study-if that was the mot juste-the works of Gaudi and 
his circle, to riffle through the boxes of prints and cards and old photos 
in the dark narrow bookshops in the Barri Gotic, and then, at three in 
the afternoon, to have lunch.
The meals of my conversion took place in the fish restaurants that 
stuck like wooden fingers out to the beach at Barceloneta, the triangular 
grid of tenement blocks occupying the northern end of the port, built 
by an eighteenth-century engineer to house some of the fishermen and
other workers left roofless after the Bourbon conquest of Barcelona in 
1714. These restaurants are gone now, swept away by the socialist city 
government's redevelopment of the seashore. They were a popular in-
stitution then, and cheap. The best of them was called El Salmonete, 
but they all had much the same layout. One walked past the open kitchen, 
with its haze of smoke from the roaring grills and crackle of sea things 
dumped with a flourish in tubs of boiling oil, and past the gargantuan 
display of ingredients-the round trays of cigalas, each stiffly arched on 
the ice; the mounds of red shrimp; the arrays of dentex, sea bass, squid, 
minuscule sand dabs, sardines, and toad-headed anglerfish; the tanks of 
live rock lobsters (Palinurus vulgaris, named for Aeneas's drowned helms-
man). One sat down as near the doors to the sea as possible. One struggled 
with the Catalan menu.
Fried baby eels arrived, like white spaghetti in boiling oil; raw goose-
neck barnacles known as percebes; and parrilladas, oval steel platters 
crammed with six or eight kinds of grilled fish. The long noisy room
was full of families, three generations represented at each trestle table, 
from elderly patriarchs with seamed faces and nailbrush mustaches, 
down to allioli-smeared infants gumming their first squid. Beyond the 
glass doors, it seemed that half the working population of Barcelona was 
spending its lunchtime on the beach. No matter that the sand was grayish 
brown and littered with plastic. This was a populist paradise, like Reg-
inald Marsh's drawings of Coney Island in the 1930s or the Bondi Beach 
I had left behind in Sydney in 1964.
Barceloneta presented a spectacle of democratic pleasure very unlike 
other parts of the Mediterranean I had come to know. This, it dawned 
on me through the wine and the hubbub, was because the city around
it was in essence a citizen's town. Barcelona has always been more a city 
of capital and labor than of nobility and commoners; its democratic roots 
are old and run very deep. Its medieval charter of citizens' rights, the 
Usatges, grew from a nucleus which antedated the Magna Carta by more 
than a hundred years. Its government, the Conseil de Cent (Council of 
One Hundred), had been the oldest protodemocratic political body in 
Spain. On it, artisans and laborers had equal votes with landowners and 
bankers. Catalans were fervent trade unionists at a time when most other 
Spaniards were bowing to the throne, and repeatedly, from the Burning 
of the Convents in 1835, through its various revolts of the 1840s and 
185os, its anarchist bombings of the 1 89os, the orgy of anticlerical vi-
olence called the Setmana Tragica in igog, and, of course, its bitter 
resistance to Franco and its terrible internecine conflicts and betrayals 
among anarchists, republicans, and Stalinists during the civil war of
1936-39, the city tore or blew itself apart in spasms of class violence. 
This seemed (at least to a young and vaguely left-leaning writer in the 
196os) to confer on it a more romantic character than most other modern 
places in Spain. The independence of Barcelonese working-class char-
acter was summed up in a cabaret song about the girl from Sants, the 
quarter between Montjuic and the sea, where the big calico mills once 
were. "Sot filla de Sants, / tint les males sangs i les tares / de la llibertat":
I am a daughter of Sants
And I've got the bloodymindedness 
And the faults
Of the freedom
My parents gave me-
The factory made me feel 
Whimsical ...
I admired the signs of this spirit with the naive intensity that (for-
tunately or not) is reserved for one's twenties. But what did foreigners, 
including juvenile art critics, know about Barcelona and its peculiar local
culture twenty-five years ago? Almost nothing. The fifteen hundred 
years of the city's existence had produced only five names that came 
easily to mind: the cellist Pau Casals, the artist Joan Mir6 and his some-
what tarnished coeval Salvador Dali, both of whom were still very much 
alive, and the dead architect Antoni Gaudi, whom most visitors supposed 
to have been some kind of a Surrealist as well. And Picasso, who had 
studied there as a youth and remained sentimentally attached to his 
memories of its fin de siecle bohemia. Barcelona was the springboard 
from which he dived into Paris. There were fragments of literary as-
sociation too: Jean Genet, for instance, had reputedly based his play The 
Balcony on a seedily grand whorehouse that in the 196os still existed in 
the Eixample. It boasted rooms of illusion whose tattiness echoed that 
of the preelectronic funfair up on Tibidabo. They included, apart from 
the usual dungeons and fairy grottoes, a room fixed up as the sleeping 
carriage on an imagined Orient Express. The bed shook and a crudely 
painted diorama of the Alps unrolled past the window, getting stuck 
now and again. But the house, far from being the theater of power 
imagined by Genet, was frequented mainly by sedate Catalan busi-
nessmen who played Parcheesi with the girls.
Apart from Gaudi's more visible buildings, such as the Sagrada 
Familia or La Pedrera (the Stone Quarry, as everyone calls the undu-
lating apartment block, formally known as the Casa Mila, on Passeig de
Gracia), the rest of the city might as well have been created-to a 
foreigner's eye-by men from Mars. Barcelona had two great periods 
of building: the first in the Middle Ages, which created the Old City, 
and the second between 187o and igio, which formed the Eixample, 
the New City. Most of these buildings were in a recognizable Art Nou-
veau idiom, and in the mid- i96os the rehabilitation of Art Nouveau had 
not yet happened; for most people it was still an obsolete, unrevivable 
period style, an ornamental freak, liked mainly by hippies.
No guidebooks to Barcelonese architecture existed that were of any 
use. Who outside Catalunya had ever heard of such architects as Lluis 
Domenech i Montaner, for instance, or Josep Puig i Cadafalch? Or, for 
that matter, Ildefons Cerda i Sunyer, the socialist civil engineer who in 
1859 had designed the grid layout of the Eixample, the first of modern-
ism's Utopian city plans and (in its original form) the only humane one? 
What foreign visitors, except a few specialists who knew Catalan, could 
read the verse of Barcelona's leading poets of the period from 1875 to 
1925, Jacint Verdaguer, Joan Maragall. Josep Carner? Or the sinewy 
and idiomatic prose of its indefatigable chronicler, Josep Pla, the city's 
memory man? None that I knew, and certainly not me. Portable and 
untroubled by the opacities of foreign language, painting crossed the 
world's cultural frontiers easily. You might (indeed, you would) some-
what misunderstand Mir6 by not grasping the Catalanism that lies behind 
so many of his images and by missing the peculiarly local references in 
his work-hints that cannot be fully experienced without visiting Ca-
talunya and knowing something about the special sentiments that, in the 
early 1 900s, attached to its folklore and rural life. The same, mutatis 
mutandis, with Dah. But you could certainly tune in to what was general, 
rather than local, in their surrealism. This was not the case with other 
aspects of Catalan culture, and so the city remained largely illegible to 
the foreigner. And what kind of political history, earlier than the civil 
war, was inscribed on its stones? Nobody except the Catalans-and not 
all of them, either-seemed to know.
II 
The sight of the present was disagreeable enough. In the late 196os only 
a minority of Barceonns had any adult memory of democratic govern-
ment in Spain. Those born after 1925 had none whatsoever. Franco's 
dictatorship had begun in 1939 and it was to last until 1975: thirty-six 
years of uninterrupted one-man power, consolidated, at first, by venge-
ance and a ruthless settling of scores. The Caudillo had started off with 
a purge of all Catalan resistance. Thousands of left-wingers were shot 
without trial, beginning at the top with Lluis Companys, the last re-
publican president of the Generalitat, the provincial government of Ca-
talunya. Many of their bodies-nobody knows how many, since the 
Falange did not keep records-were cast into an abandoned quarry on 
the southern flank of Montjuic; twenty years later, if the ground of this 
mass grave was wet from rain, one could still smell the very faint but 
persistent odor of their decay in the air. Tens of thousands more Ca-
talans, like other Spaniards, fled into exile or were deported.
Opposition parties continued to exist in Catalunya after 1939, tol-
erated, though barely, in order to diffuse the image of autocracy. There 
was, for instance, the National Front of Catalunya, a left-wing nationalist 
group, and the Liberty Front, consisting mainly of Marxists and anarcho-
syndicalists, which was in effect a splinter off the POUM, or Partit 
Obrer d'Unificacio Marxista, the party that had played so large a role 
in Catalunya during the civil war. But they were closely watched, tiny 
and completely ineffective. Though resentment of Franco simmered on 
among Barcelonese workers, the unions were too weak to provide any 
organized resistance; the postwar years had only one big strike, in 1951, 
in protest against a fare increase on Barcelona's soon-to-be-abolished 
tramway system. It was the last protest by the civil war generation of 
Catalan workers. The 1950s saw all vestiges of anti-Franco hopes extin-
guished, and even the forlorn expectation of moral pressure from abroad 
died when Franco signed accords with the Vatican and with the United 
States in 1953-

One of the key elements of Franco's ideology was centralism: the 
belief, to which no exceptions were allowed, that Spain was a unified 
body whose head was Madrid; that, in the celebrated phrase of Jose 
Ortega y Gasset, "Spain is a thing made by Castile." This concept had 
had a long history. It had lain at the core of the policies of the Hapsburg 
and then the Bourbon monarchs toward Catalunya. As long as it existed, 
Catalans resented it as an affront to their sense of political selfhood. That 
selfhood was definitively lost with the civil war. Barcelona had been the 
last bastion of resistance to Franco, and the dictator never forgave the 
city for it. After 1939 Catalunya was disbanded as an autonomous po-
litical region and split into four smaller provinces.
Now the Caudillo disliked Barcelona not only because it resisted 
him but because tsars, emperors, and dictators, right or left, are apt to 
distrust ports; in the days of shipping, port cities were too open to the 
influence of foreigners, to strange and nonnative ideas-shifting and
labile places, offering an ease of entry and exit that a landlocked capital 
does not. The port is where the ser autentic, or "essence," of a country, 
as centralizing power imagines it, begins to fray. That is why Peter the 
Great's successors shifted the capital of Russia from Saint Petersburg to 
Moscow; why Kemal Atatiirk, inheriting one of the world's great port 
capitals in Istanbul, chose to create a new administrative center in An-
kara; why the absurd and artificial Brasilia, not Rio de Janeiro, is the 
capital of Brazil. It may also help explain Franco's desire to make it clear 
to Barcelona that it no longer had any right to consider itself the capital 
of anywhere.
The retribution that Falangism visited on its defeated enemy was 
cultural. Freedom of thought, publication, and teaching were suppressed 
throughout Spain as a whole, but in Catalunya the target was language
itself. The civil war had been a class struggle, but Franco saw very 
clearly that the Catalans were also animated by strong feelings of local, 
cultural nationalism and that this was bound up with the preservation 
and use of their language.
In 1714, as part of Catalunya's punishment for backing the wrong 
side in the War of the Spanish Succession, Felipe V banned the public 
use of Catalan in teaching, publishing, the press, and government. The
logic was simple: deprived of their ancestral tongue, the Catalans would 
no longer be able to think separatist thoughts. This strategem failed, but 
after 1939 Franco renewed it, with much more efficiency and zeal. As 
a result, you could walk down the Ramblas in 1966 hearing Catalan 
spoken on every side and see newspapers, magazines, and books on the 
newsstands in all languages-Spanish, German, English, French, 
Dutch, Swedish-except one: Catalan. The official line was that Catalan 
was merely a dialect of Spanish and, as such, a source of internal division, 
a useless linguistic fossil. "It may be said," ran a state-sponsored textbook 
of the time, cast in question-and-answer form, "that in Spain only the 
Castilian language is spoken, for apart from it, only Basque is used, 
which is spoken as the only language in no more than a few Basque 
hamlets; it is reduced to the functions of a dialect by its linguistic and 
philological poverty. Q.-And what are the main dialects spoken in 
Spain? A.-They are four: Catalan, Valencian, Majorcan and Galician.
This was, in fact, false. Catalan is not a dialect of Castilian. Never-
theless, Franco's campaign against it was effective-in the short run. 
Writers might write in Catalan as a gesture of defiance, but their relation
with the public was broken, since Catalan texts had only a small chance 
of publication. Nevertheless there were signs of relaxation of the ban in 
the 1 96os. From 1959 onward intellectuals and academics had been
petitioning the government to "normalize" the use of Catalan, but with 
scant success. Then in 1962 an indispensable publishing venture began: 
Editions 62, whose aim was to bring out, in paperback, as complete a 
set as possible of significant literary and historic texts written in Catalan, 
from the early chronicles of Jaume I and Bernat Desclot through to the 
present. In 1967 the regime reluctantly allowed the University of Bar-
celona to form a department of Catalan-language studies, whose classes, 
nevertheless, were conducted in Castilian-Catalan was taught as though 
it were a foreign language like French or English. In 1970 the secondary 
schools were allowed to teach Catalan, but under the same conditions, 
though such courses were uncommon and did not become general until 
after 1975, the year of Franco's death.
In 1966 Catalan was still officially a proscribed language-even shop 
signs and street names had to be in Castilian-and the anti-Catalanist 
slogans of the Falange were still fresh in memory: "Perro Catalan, babla
en cristiano" ("Catalan dog, speak Christian") or, a shade less offensively, 
"No ladres! Habla la lengua del imperio!" ("Don't bark! Speak the language 
of the empire!"). Most Catalans, particularly in the countryside and the 
provincial towns outside Barcelona, still spoke Catalan as a matter of 
course. But so long a campaign against the language had effects that are 
still felt today. Eleven years after Franco died, the 1986 census showed 
that while 89 percent of the residents of Catalunya between forty-five 
and sixty-four years of age (that is, the sector of the populace that had 
grown to adulthood during his dictatorship-1.36 million people) could 
understand Catalan when it was spoken to them, only 59 percent of them 
could actually speak it, 55 percent read it, and a mere 20 percent write 
it. By contrast, among the 1.39 million Catalans aged fifteen to twenty-
nine-those who received their education after the Caudillo's death-
95 percent could understand the spoken language, 73 percent speak it, 
75 percent read it, and 48 percent write it. The language owed its survival 
to a tenacious oral tradition, but its increase since 1975 was also due to 
an aggressive program of education launched by the new democratic 
governments of both the province of Catalunya and the city of Barcelona. 
The "implantation" and "fomentation" of Catalan (two words favored 
by the new breed of sociologues) were a necessary prelude to Catalan 
autodeterminacio-whatever that was going to mean.
The strongest spontaneous impulse toward the reinstatement of Ca-
talan among the young in the 1 96os came from popular folk and early 
rock music, which was almost automatically political. Pop singers who
wrote and performed in Catalan saw themselves as the heirs of Carles 
Aribau i Farriols, the romantic poet whose "Oda a la Pitria," written
in Catalan in 1833, was the emblematic starting point of the nineteenth-
century cultural separatist movement in Barcelona known as the Re-
naixenca. The year 1959 saw the manifesto of the Nova Canco (New 
Song) movement, an article by Llufs Serrahima arguing for the right to 
sing popular songs in the language of the people. New Song rapidly 
accumulated a nucleus of talent, and its best-known group was Els Setze 
Jutges, The Sixteen Judges, whose odd-sounding name came from a 
phrase used as a password by Catalan patriot troops during the rising 
against an occupation army in 1 64o during the Reapers' War: "Setze jutges 
d'un jutjat menjen fetge d'un penjat" ("Sixteen judges on a tribunal eat the 
liver of a hanged man"). No lisping Castilian, it was believed, could 
pronounce this barrage of fricatives. New Song got popular fast. The 
state radio and television channels were opposed to giving it airtime-
in 1968 there was a noisy confrontation with Spanish television when 
the singer Joan Manuel Serrat was chosen to represent Spain at the 
Eurovision Festival, insisted on singing in Catalan, and found his ap-
pearance canceled at the last minute-but despite continuous lawsuits 
and fines and prohibitions the records sold widely. Two songs in par-
ticular became symbols of anti-Franco sentiment among the young: 
"L'Estaca" ("The Stake") by Llufs Llach, and "Diguem No" ("Let's Say 
No") by Ramon Pelegro, who sang under the name of Raimon.
The sheer pervasiveness of Franco in the late i96os-and, truth to 
tell, the general acquiescence to his regime shown by the ever-pragmatic 
Catalan middle classes, who cozied up to him after the civil war as quickly
as, two hundred years before, they had to the occupying regidors of the 
Bourbon king Felipe V-gave the discontents of youth in Barcelona an 
air more symbolic than practical. Young Barcelona, as Manuel Vdsquez 
Montalbdn caustically wrote, fell into the habit of seeing itself wistfully 
as Beauty in the thrall of the Beast; the impotence of student "revolution" 
in France was no surprise to them, for they had metabolized it as style 
some time before:
At the end 0f the 1960s, the thin social layer 0f young, cultivated 
Barcelonans, who went t0 France t0 view the May Revolution, 0r t0 
Perpignan t0 see the ass 0f Marlon Brando, 0r to Le Boulou t0 attend 
a marathon 0f films banned by Franquism, were still inexorably fated 
t0 return t0 the stable like Cinderella-before midnight, where the ogre 
was waiting. Clearly, the ogre was an added value. The sophisticated 
dialectic 0f the pair Marat and Sade, in Spain, in Catalunya, in Bar-
celona, turned itself into a picturesque menage d trois: Marat, Sade, and 
Franco.
Radical chic was as current in Barcelona during the late 1 960s and 
early 1970s as in New York 0r London. If its emblematic moment in 
Manhattan was Leonard Bernstein's fund-raiser for the Black Panthers,
in Barcelona it was produced by Oriol Regis, the owner 0f its fashionable 
political disco, Boccaccio. Several terrorist leaders 0f ETA, the Basque 
separatist movement, had been condemned t0 death in Madrid, and 
Catalan leftists occupied part 0f the monastery 0f Montserrat in protest. 
In a gesture that combined the selflessness 0f the Jacobin with the aplomb 
0f Marie Antoinette, Regis dispatched a small van full 0f Boccaccio's 
expensive smoked-salmon sandwiches t0 the holy mountain s0 that its 
occupiers would not g0 hungry in the expected police siege. (It never 
materialized: the radicals ate their sandwiches and departed.)
In habits, in entertainment, in morals-disgracefully lax, by the 
puritan standards 0f Franquism, and getting laxer-and in the sense 0f 
style sustained by its esquerra divina, 0r "divine left" (a play 0f words,
0f course, 0n the divine right 0f Spanish monarchs and, by extension, 
0f Franco), in their bars and clubs along the Carrer Tuset, Barcelona in 
the 1960s was more clearly oriented toward Paris, London, and New 
York than toward Madrid. But it had also been very deeply marked by 
Franco, and in more areas than that 0f language. Particularly s0 in the 
composition, shape, and texture 0f the city itself.
III
Barcelona had a habit 0f getting and losing its mayors and city govern-
ments with bewildering speed. Between 1890 and 1900, for instance, it 
had n0 fewer than fifteen mayors. After Franco won the civil war, this 
turnover stopped. The longest mayoral office in Barcelona's history was 
held by Franco's appointee, Josep Maria de Porcioles i Colomer, who 
took over the Ajuntament, 0r city hall, in March 1957 and remained 
there for sixteen years straight, retiring only in 1973, two years before 
his patron's death. This period 0f one-party rule was also one 0f huge 
demographic change in the population and economy 0f Barcelona.
Between 19z0 and 1930 the population 0f Barcelona had risen by 41 
percent, reaching one million at the end 0f the decade and making it the 
most populous city in Spain. It was pulling in twenty-five thousand
immigrants a year, mostly from the countryside 0f Catalunya itself. For 
obvious reasons, this growth ceased altogether during the civil war and 
hardly began t0 rise again until 1950. But then there was a wave 0f
immigration t0 Catalunya from the miserably poor regions 0f southern 
Spain, Andalusia especially. By 1965, two million people, half the total 
population 0f Catalunya, were living in Barcelona. Today, there are 
nearly four million, the same population as Sydney 0r Los Angeles.
This growth continued, at a slightly less frantic pace, through the 
1970s, and its effect 0n the fabric 0f the city was vast. It created the 
human fuel for Barcelona's new industrial expansion, which took place
0n a hitherto unimagined scale. It also began t0 dissolve the city's once-
comprehensible shape-in the absence 0f any thoughtful 0r compre-
hensive planning by Porcioles's city government. Through the 1950s 
Barcelona sprawled outward into a formless periphery 0f factories, ter-
rains vagues, and industrial slums. Just as the New City 0f the nineteenth-
century, the Eixample, had gobbled up villages once considered remote 
and distinct from the Old City-Sants, Gracia, Sant Andreu-so the 
newer Barcelona 0f the late Franco years absorbed more than twenty 
neighboring towns and created an industrial belt that stretched as far as 
the Llobregat River t0 the south 0f the city. Between 1964 and 1977 
alone, more than five hundred industrial companies pitched their fac-
tories 0n this growing periphery: auto factories, metal-processing plants, 
plastics, chemicals, synthetic fibers.
The first result 0f this expansion was a growth 0f industrial slums 
-mass cramming 0f existing buildings, with few effective laws 0r means 
0f inspection t0 restrain it. Then, t0 house the new workers, enormous 
polygonal clusters 0f housing blocks were run up, bearing names the 
tourist never hears-Torrent Gornal, La Pedrosa, Bellvitge, La Gui-
neneta, Verdum, Singuerlin. (The tourists, meanwhile, were also arriv-
ing in force in Catalunya from the late 1950s 0n, heading for Majorca 
and the semispoiled beaches 0f the Costa Brava north 0f Barcelona, the 
first fish-and-chip belt 0f the Mediterranean holiday industry-which 
needed migrant labor as well.) Some 0f Barcelona's outlying villages, 
such as Santa Coloma de Gramanet, multiplied their population sev-
enfold between 1950 and 1970. Fortunes were t0 be made in these new 
localities out 0f cinder blocks, cheap terra-cotta, electrical supplies, 
plumbing; and if you were in with the local authorities, you made them. 
"On earth, the God 0f Wealth was made / Sole Patron 0f the Building 
Trade." These were the Spanish cousins 0f the grands ensembles that were 
t0 cause such misery and alienation among French workers in the same 
period: termitaries built by speculators under license from the Caudillo's 
placemen, designed without paved roads, playgrounds for the kids, 0r 
other signs 0f thought for infrastructure 0r public space, quite often 
made 0f poor materials that started falling apart within a few years. They
illustrated the truth that when public housing is at stake, there is not 
always much t0 choose from between left and right: Franco's Spain 
produced the same results as Brezhnev's Russia 0r Pompidou's France, 
because abstraction, incuriosity, and greed are among the common at-
tributes 0f mankind. It is de rigueur today t0 blame Porcioles and, 
through him, Franquism itself for everything that went wrong with the 
urban structure and services 0f Barcelona between the end 0f the war 
and 1975, as though the Caudillo's ideology had some unique power t0 
degrade a city that other political systems did not possess.
But the truth is that neither the capitalist nations (England, France, 
Italv, the United States, 0r Australia) nor the Marxist regimes (Russia 
and its European satellites) did much better than the ritually loathed
Porcioles in the domain 0f urbanism. In those three decades few people 
in power anywhere in the world, right, left, 0r center, gave a hoot for 
the kind 0f historical, contextual, and environmental responsibilities that 
city planners must now, at the risk 0f citizen protest and press criticism, 
at city planners pay lip service t0. A regard for city context, for planning in 
terms 0f large and small fabrics 0f use and life, in terms 0f preserving 
what was already in place and 0f value, was hardly even a gleam in the 
eye 0f civic authorities until the mid-197os, and Porcioles was probably 
n0 worse than his counterparts in London, New York, 0r Rome. This, 
after all, was the period that occluded Saint Paul's with its mediocre 
jumble 0f institutional high rises, which saw the creation 0f urban horrors 
like Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, and choked the sea gate 0f downtown 
Sydney with its impacted skyscrapers.
S0 the visitor-locked in the roaring maw 0f traffic between the 
indifferent high-rise walls 0f the autovia that cuts north toward France 
and is called the Meridiana 0971), 0r gazing at the brutal gashes 0f the
Via Augusta and the Avinguda General Mitre, Haussmann-like incisions 
that tore out s0 much 0f interest in the upper part 0f nineteenth-century 
Barcelona-may not think kindly 0f Porcioles; but in honesty one should 
reflect that he was n0 worse than many 0f his counterparts elsewhere 
and should not demonize him, as it is the custom t0 d0 among bien-
pensant designers in Barcelona these days. Except for the Fundacio Mir6 
(Mir6 Foundation) and three 0r four others, most 0f the new buildings 
0f "his" Barcelona lack distinction, and some are ugly solecisms-the 
worst being the office extension 0f the Ajuntament, a repellent concrete-
and-glass multistory box, jammed into the Gothic environment 0f the 
Old City. But at least Porcioles did not tear down any Gaudi buildings 
the way, New York destroyed the old McKim, Meade, and White Penn-

sylvania Station, one 0f the most beautiful Beaux-Arts spaces in the 
world, in the 1960s.
Sins 0f omission, as much as those 0f commission, were what de-
pressed the urban fabric 0f Barcelona in the Franco years. The city had n0 
coherent policy 0n maintenance and restoration 0f its historic pre-civil
war buildings. Entropy ruled, in the midst 0f opportunistic speculation 
and official corruption. It was much costlier t0 convert a nineteenth-
century palace into flats than t0 raze it and put up a seven-story block 
0n the site; the new building would look like stained cardboard in ten 
years, but who cared? If the new periphery 0f Barcelona was chaos, the 
Eixample and the old center began t0 turn into grunge-one 0f the worst 
parts being the Ramblas, whose neoclassical essence all but disappeared 
behind honky-tonk placards. Here, policy seems t0 have reinforced ne-
glect. The great square at the seaward end 0f the Ramblas, Playa Reial, 
became a drug and prostitution market and the city council was quite 
content t0 leave it that way, since it tended t0 condense petty criminals 
and hippies in one spot, where they could be watched.
Many valuable modernista structures were demolished, 0r left t0 de-
cay, 0r wrecked by intrusive "renovation." They were regarded as hope-
lessly old-fashioned and thus became fair game for whatever changes
commercial interests saw fit t0 wreak 0n them. Of course, this had 
happened before; an egregious case from the days 0f the Republic was 
the demolition 0f the Cafe Torino at 18 Passeig de Gracia, _a small 
masterpiece 0f Gaudi's that was replaced by the boring glass-block Joy-
eria Roca by Jose-Lluis Sert. But now the tempo 0f loss accelerated, 
showing itself not only in dull new structures where fine old ones had 
been but also in decay and ugly renovations. One victim among many 
was Gaudi's Casa Mila 0n Passeig de GrAcia, which by the beginning 
0f the 1 980s was in pitiable shape. The frescoes 0n the entrance floor 
had decayed t0 illegibility, the mezzanine had become a bingo hall, neon 
signs disfigured the facade, rectangular metal-frame windows were 
jammed in at street level by shop owners who did not want t0 spend 
money 0n frames that would follow the curve 0f the openings. It was 
also filthy, the creamy-white Montjuic limestone 0f its facades dulled t0 
dark brown.
Across the street one could see the even worse vandalism inflicted 
0n Domenech i Montaner's Casa Lleo Morera by a luxury leather-goods 
firm named Loewe. These handbag makers tore out the whole street-

level facade, destroying its sculptures by Eusebi Arnau, along with all 
the rest 0f its decorative detail, and stuck in plate glass instead. N0 one
who cares for architecture should ever buy anything from Loewe, 0n 
principle.
There were some bright spots in La Barcelonagrisa, "gray Barcelona," 
as the present city hall dubbed Porcioles's city in one 0f its many public-
relations brochures. In the 196os the gradual conversion and renovation
0f the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century merchants' town houses 0n Carrer 
Montcada began, and the Picasso Museum was created in two 0f them 
-a brilliant recycling 0f medieval architecture t0 accommodate Picasso's 
gift 0f a huge block 0f his earliest work t0 the city in which he had 
created much 0f it. Likewise, it was in 1970 that Joan Miro, the greatest 
artist Catalunya had produced since the twelfth century, created the 
Fundacio Mirfi, endowed it with a mass 0f his work, and gave the money 
for Jose-Lluis Sert t0 create a home for it 0n Montjuic. At the time, both 
these small, concentrated one-man museums seemed very innovative. 
They suggested that, underneath the Franquist crust, a new Barcelona 
was preparing t0 emerge.
Over these decades, investment in the Eixample was piecemeal and 
in the Old City gradual; otherwise much more 0f the past would have 
been lost. As things were, good buildings merely decayed 0r else were
hidden by the scurf 0f additions, renovations, chaotic signs, placards, 
neon. But because the Franco period was also a paradise of unregulation 
for small-scale Catalan speculators, it brought endless harm t0 the Eix-
ample as a city plan. Its designer, Ildefons Cerda, had intended that its 
chamfered blocks carry only a small density 0f housing, limited in height 
and each block with open garden space in the middle. The 19sos and 
196os brought the final collapse 0f this century-old ideal, whose regu-
lations could n0 longer be enforced; by the time the Barceonns had 
finished adding new attics t0 the blocks, closing them off, covering the 
internal patios with storage rooms, garages, and the like, the whole center 
0f the Eixample had acquired the look 0f a dense, grimy, Brobdingnagian 
beehive.
One strikingly poetic Catalan phrase evokes the drabness 0f Barce-
lona twenty-five years ago: "color de gos com fuig," "the color 0f a dog 
running away"-that is, n0 color, indeterminacy, mud, yet with some-

thing unquestionably there. Barcelona was culturally the most exciting 
city in Spain, filled with a potential for change that seemed absent (at 
least, t0 the visitor) in Madrid. And who could deny that there were 
pleasures in the city, in its apparently secret life and its artistic cliques, 
its cheap restaurants and ten-dollar-a-night hotels with big, slightly 
musty rooms, its entertainments-the broad infectious humor 0f the old 
music halls like El Molino 0n the Parallel-veiled from the foreigner by
his ignorance 0f Catalan (all 0f which may be disappearing today under 
the stress 0f Barcelona's PoMo fixations, its concern with attitude and 
self-exposition)? Not t0 mention a kind 0f bohemian style, a dandyism 
that lingered 0n, whose roots lay in the nineteenth century among the 
tables of Els Quatre Gats cafe (and are now permanently withered by 
the deodorant-laden breath 0f Catalan yuppiedom)? A friend used t0 
recount, as the quintessence 0f this attitude, the story 0f an elderly and 
impoverished poet named Albert Llanas, who was making his way down 
the Ramblas one morning, dressed in his last perfectly cut dove-gray 
Saturday suit but wondering where his next bite t0 eat would come 
from. He looked up and recognized the widow 0f a distant acquaintance 
0n a balcony.
"Madam," he cried politely, fingering the lapel in which n0 bouton-
niere yet reposed, "d0 you have a pin?"
"I believe s0, Senyor Llanas."
"Then would you be s0 kind as t0 stick it in a piece 0f bread and 
throw it down t0 me?"
You could still see traces of that ancient, tattered dandyism in Bar-
celona twenty-five years ago. Today, none remains. It lived at all levels. 
The Catalan gypsies 0f the Parallel had it in abundance. Corbero swears 
that he owes his conception 0f the dignity 0f his metier as an artist t0 
three gypsy friends back in the early 1960s, old-clothes sellers who went 
under the nicknames of Puga (Flea), Flanel (Flannel), and Plastic. They 
were brilliant salesmen. They sold the worst, the rattiest clothes as 
though they were the newest English tweeds from Bel 0n Passeig de 
GrAcia. They were s0 good that the artist, amazed, suggested that they 
g0 upscale. Why not put some 0f the take back into buying better 
merchandise, things that-compared with the coarse rubbish they now 
sold with such virtuoso effort-would walk out 0f the cart? Flea, Flannel, 
and Plastic listened to this suggestion gravely and with scorn. "You may 
be right about the pesetas," concluded Flannel, dismissively. "But what 
about art?"
1V 
General Francisco Franco y Bahamonde died, after a long illness, 0n 
November 20, 1975. Fortunately for Spain, his expected successor, Ad-
miral Luis Carrero Blanco, had already been blown t0 pieces by a Basque 
separatist bomb in 1973-one 0f the few terrorist actions 0f the 1970s
that can be shown to have had unequivocally good results, since it left 
n0 one in power capable 0f preserving the ideology 0f Franquism. When 
the news 0f Franco's death was announced 0n radio and television, 
Barcelona went into ecstasy. Everyone except the Guardia Civil poured 
into the streets, danced, hollered, and got drunk. Red and yellow stripes 
waved everywhere: the four red bars, symbol 0f Catalunya. Within 
hours, not a case of cava, the local champagne, or even a bottle of Moet 
or Cliquot, remained in the city. Under the aegis of the new king, Juan 
Carlos I, the work 0f dismantling the institutions 0f Franquism and 
making a peaceful transfer t0 democracy-the ruptura pactada, 0r "ne-
gotiated break" with the old regime-now began. This task fell t0 the 
national government of Adolfo Sudrez. In the first democratic general 
elections on June 15, 1977, the centrist UCD (Central Democratic Union) 
won by a handy majority throughout Spain, with the PSOE (Spanish 
Workers' Socialist Party, the oldest socialist political group in Spain, 
nearing its hundredth birthday) in second place. In Barcelona, however, 
the polls favored the "socialists 0f Catalunya," a coalition 0f local socialists 
and PSOE (28.5 percent) over the UCD (18.7 percent); the city's obrerista 
temper was clearly undiminished, although the Catalan countryside 
voted, as it always had in the far past, more conservatively.
These alignments came t0 dominate the provincial and municipal 
elections in Catalunya. There, in 1978, the PSOE merged with a newly 
formed local party, the PSC, or Partit Socialista de Catalunya. It went
into the first municipal elections of the post-Franco period led by a 
brilliantly gifted young economist named Narcis Serra i Serra, a former 
student at the London School of Economics, who had been expelled 
from his teaching post at the University 0f Barcelona for siding with 
student protests against Franco in the early 1970s. The PSC-PSOE took 
34 percent 0f the votes, almost twice the score 0f its nearest rival, the 
older and more radical-Marxist PSUC, 0r Partit Socialista Unificat de 
Catalunya. A few years later, the PSUC would go the way 0f many a 
European socialist party overloaded with old-style Leninists and pro-
Soviet ideologues-down, into schism and irreconcilable squabbles, as 
the Soviet empire in central Europe began t0 break up. The PSC-PSOE, 
which was more moderate in its socialist inclinations and attracted the 
votes 0f the young, was unharmed by this and went 0n from strength 
t0 strength. In the general election of October 1982, which had an 
enormous voting turnout-almost 80 percent 0f the nationwide electorate 
went to the urns, for an attempted coup by a right-wing army officer in 
the Madrid parliament early in 1981 had raised the specter 0f the Caudillo 
again, reminding Spaniards how fragile their new democracy might
be-the socialists picked up six million extra votes from people disen-
chanted with the far left and from the disintegration of the Central 
Democratic Union. In Barcelona alone the PSC-PSOE got one hundred 
thousand votes more than in any previous general election. A socialist 
government took power in Madrid, with Felipe Gonzdlez at its head.
In Catalunya, the surprise 0f the 1979 elections had been the growing 
success 0f a new moderate-conservative coalition party in the provincial 
government, the CiU (Convergencia i Unio, 0r Convergence and Union),
founded in 1974 and led by Jordf Pujol i Soley. Doctor and banker, 
Pujol (b. 1930) had a solid record 0f opposition to Franco-not as a 
Marxist but as a Catalanist, agitating for the political independence of 
the province against Madrid, for self-determination. In the 1 95 0s nearly 
all Catalan business had to work through the local branches of Madrid 
banks t0 get its loans, but in 1959 Pujol had laid the cornerstone 0f an 
independent Catalan banking system by founding the Banca Catalana, 
the first such institution in the province. Naturally this endeared him 
t0 Catalan businessmen, and he earned a more general popularity the 
next year by his association with the so-called fets del Palau (deeds 0f the 
Palau). In May 196o Franco made one 0f his rare visits to Barcelona, 
accompanied by his ministers. On May 19, the ministers attended a 
concert at the Palau de la Musica Catalana, the sumptuous modernista 
concert hall built in 1905-8 by Domenech i Montaner as the home of 
Catalan choral music. The concert was given for the centenary 0f the 
Barcelonese poet Joan Maragall, and it included a musical setting 0f his 
patriotic poem "El Cant de la Senyera" ("The Song of the Flag"), the 
Catalanist anthem and, as such, banned by Franco. T0 the consternation 
0f the Franquist dignitaries, a group 0f Catalan nationalists rose from 
the audience and sang along with the orchestra:
Ob, bandera catalana 
nostre cor t'es ben fidel. 
Volaras com au galana 
per damunt del nostre anbel. 
Per mirar-te sobirana 
alfarem els ulls al cel.
O flag of Catalunya
our hearts keep faith with you. 
You will fly like a brave bird 
above our desires.
To see you reigning there 
we'll lift our eyes to the sky.
Scandalized, the Franquists started a wave of arrests and detentions; 
though he had not been in the palau that night, Pujol was sentenced to 
seven years in prison and served three of them. Released in 1963, he
rapidly became the voice of conservative local interests: Pujol was, and 
is, a highly recognizable Catalan type of politician-the reincarnation 
of those Catalanist burghers who ran Barcelona in the late nineteenth 
century on a platform of industrial expansion and local patriotism, 
preaching self-determination for the province while constantly negoti-
ating with Madrid. The socialists appealed to the idea of an interna-
tionalized Catalunya, open to the "mainstream" beyond the Pyrenees; 
Pujol invoked the local, the immemorial "deep Catalunya," while im-
plying that it could become as fiscally solid as Switzerland or Japan if 
only Madrid would leave it to its own economic devices. This gave him 
and his party, the CiU, a solid base among the large stratum of Catalans, 
particularly outside Barcelona, who did not think of themselves as 
members of something diffuse, called Europe, and distrusted socialism 
anyway, even in the moderate and unideological form practiced by the 
PSC-PSOE. Thus, when Catalunya held "autonomous" elections as a 
province in March 1980 (the first elections of that kind in almost fifty 
years), Pujol's Convergence and Union party, running on a self-deter-
mination ticket against the socialists' platform of orientation to Europe, 
swept into the Generalitat with a large margin. The CiU, not the PSC-
PSOE, was now the majority party of Catalunya, and Jordi Pujol has 
remained the president of the Generalitat down to the present day, just 
as the socialists-led first by Narcis Serra and since 1982 by Pasqual 
Maragall i Mira (b. 1941), grandson of the poet and a formidable politician 
himself-have been returned to power in the Ajuntament by the twelve 
districts of the city electorate without missing a beat.
Thus for the last ten years there has been a heads-and-tails face-off 
across Playa Sant Jaume, the center of the Old City: Pujol's moderate 
conservatives in the Generalitat, Maragall's moderate socialists in the
Ajuntament, each competing to be seen as more truly "Catalan" than 
the other. The difference is that, as the historian Felipe Fernandez-
Armesto recently wrote, "though the inhabitants of City Hall are all 
good Catalanists, they were put there by the votes of non-Catalan im-
migrant workers, mostly Andalusians, whose loyalty to Catalan identity, 
traditions and language is, at best, slight and secondary." In the eyes of 
the electorate, Pujol's party wins the more-Catalan-than-thou contest 
hands down, because the Generalitat's idea of Catalanism is reinforced 
with older images of Catalan identity than the Ajuntament's. One ex-
ample on the cultural plane, and by no means a minor one, is the
Generalitat's policy of encouraging a statewide program in the study of 
Catalan folklore. (Curiously enough, the Catalan word for "folklore" is 
folklore. It used to be cultura popular, until pop culture heaved in sight, 
causing a tangle whose only exit lay through an Anglicism.) Thus, while 
Nlaragall's officials in the Ajuntament and on the Olympic Cultural 
Committee concern themselves with glorifying the city by restoring 
modernista buildings or choosing the right American architect to design 
a new museum of modern art, Pujol's officials set up congresses on the 
traditional art forms of Catalunya: rituals, festes, devil's dances, folk 
theater, sardanas, or castells-those peculiar images of the Catalan ad-
miration for aplomb, phlegm, and cooperation, in which sixteen, twenty, 
or more husky young men, known as castellers, clamber on one another's 
shoulders to form a human tower.
The traditional love of folklore-naturally stronger in the country 
than in the city-connects to another long-standing Catalan trait, a fond-
ness for special-interest groups, local cells, affinities of every kind from
choral societies to pigeon-fancying clubs. These are details that no pol-
itician can afford to ignore, because they enable Catalans to feel like 
Catalans. In sport, the great bonding agent is, of course, el futbol. Bar-
celona has two bullrings, one of them fallen into semipermanent disuse, 
the other largely kept alive by Andalusian migrants and foreign tourists. 
Tauromachy has never been an obsession in Catalunya, as it is farther 
south, and the only real Catalan aficionado I have ever met is a bullfight 
critic named Mariano de la Cruz, who also happens to be a leading 
Barcelonese psychiatrist, specializing-to judge from the large collection 
of inscribed drawings and prints on his walls-in the neuroses of local 
artists. Anywhere else in Spain, the idea of a shrink writing about a 
corrida would be unthinkable. But to see Catalan patriotism in full 
collective cry, go to the stadium one night when a big soccer game-
Barca versus Madrid, ideally-is on, and 120,000 throats are bawling 
in chorus for the home team while the heraldic figures dash and dodge 
on the unnaturally green field and tiny frantic bats skitter through the 
arc-lighted air.
It would be an oversimplification to say that the Ajuntament looks 
out to Europe while the Generalitat looks inward to deep Catalunya, 
but there is some truth in it. Pujol, in particular, has no hesitation in
venting rather rhetorical speculations on Catalan character and destiny. 
As he declaimed in one of his books (Construir Catalunya, 1980):
A people is a fact of mentality, of language, of feelings. It is a historic 
fact, and it is a fact of spiritual ethnicity. Finally it is a fact of will. In
our case, however, it is in an important sense an achievement of lan-
guage. The first characteristic of a people has to be the will to exist. 
It is this will, more than anything else, which assures the survival and, 
above all, the promotion, the blossoming of a people . . .
To be Catalan, in short, you may close your eyes and wish. The 
idea of "a people" is diluted to "spiritual ethnicity," whereas Catalanists 
a century ago spoke of a Catalan race. Since it is in your mentality,
language, and "feelings," rather than your birthplace and inherited cul-
ture, Catalanism is acquired and does not have to be innate; it is some-
thing any immigrant can aspire to. Such rhetoric has general appeal, 
because it is pitched both at traditional Catalans, whose families have 
been there for generations, and at new or relatively new arrivals-the 
immigrants from Andalusia, their children, and (by now) their grand-
children. By 198o these immigrants' families dominated the working 
class of Barcelona, and they knew that they had passed from Andalusia's 
misery and squalor into Catalunya's (relative) prosperity: a flat, a car for 
family outings, a television set. Hence they were impervious to the 
traditional calls of Marxism-let alone of anarchism, the ideology that 
dominated worker politics in Barcelona in the 1890s and has now van-
ished without a trace. The first wave of immigrant workers, once settled 
in Barcelona, supported the idea of Catalan autonomy because it was 
anti-Franco, not because they felt they had become Catalans. Their 
children, going to school after 1975, learned Catalan in school and from 
the television set. Most of them (72.6 percent of all residents of Catalunya 
between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine, according to the 1986 cen-
sus) could speak the Catalan tongue. But though they thought of them-
selves as Catalans the autochthonous Catalans did not necessarily accept 
them as such.
V 
There cannot be many images of cardinal social virtue in modern art, 
but one of them was certainly painted by the Catalan artist Joan Mir6. 
It is The Farm, Montroig, a portrait of the place where he spent much of 
his childhood and to which, for the rest of his life, his imagination would 
always return. He began to paint it in 1921, in the place itself: the family 
house, or casa pairal, in a small village near Tarragona, south of Barcelona. 
He then took the unfinished picture, along with a bunch of dried grass
from the farm-a fetish of contact with the Catalunya he was about to 
lose-to Paris. Shifting between lodgings, he lost the grass but replaced 
it with some from the Bois de Boulogne; the picture was too advanced 
by then to lose any truth by the substitution. Mir6 finished it in Paris 
in 1922 and eventually sold it to Ernest Hemingway, who for the rest 
of his life revered it as his fetish of Iberian memory: "It has in it," he 
wrote, "all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that 
you feel when you are away and cannot go there. No one else has_ been 
able to paint these two very opposing things."
He was right; The Farm is, above all, an expatriate's painting, com-
bining in one image the intense pressure of immediate experience of one's 
homeland and an equally extreme longing for it. Everything on the farm,
the leaves on the trees no less than each crack in the old wall and pebble 
in the red Tarragonese earth, is rendered with utter fidelity: the landscape 
is a palace of recollection, a mnemonic device in itself. Miro's sense of 
separation and longing is conveyed by a kind of visual accountancy, an 
exact toting up and tallying of everything that is (or was) the case on 
the family farm. It could be a pictorial form of the meticulous inventory 
that went with peasant marriage contracts. Each tool, pitcher, keg, press, 
cart, watering can, donkey, dog, chicken, goat, pigeon, and donkey's 
rump (just visible through the door of the hestiar on the ground floor of 
the farmhouse) is turned to the light, delineated, listed, fixed. The sharp 
focus, the hallucinated clarity of light, make the painting exquisitely 
frank. But they also produce the effect of looking down the wrong end 
of a telescope, so that the scene is remote as well. Hence The Farm's 
power as an image of nostalgia for what is distant but vivid and dear, 
for the sights, smells, and sounds of childhood. Such longings are known 
in Catalan as enyoranca._
Enyoranca was the basic trope that suffused the nationalistic literature 
of Catalunya from Carles Aribau's "Oda a la Patria" (1833) right through 
the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, when Mir6 was an
art student on the top floor of the Llotja, or Lodge, the Barcelona stock 
exchange. Indeed, a suitable gloss on The Farm might have been the lines 
of Barcelona's poet-priest Jacint Verdaguer in his most popular short 
poem, "L'Emigrant," which every Barcelonese schoolboy was taught to 
recite as a matter of course:
Dolfa Catalunya, 
patria del meu cor 
quan de to s'allunya, 
d'enyoranfa es mor.
Sweet Catalunya 
homeland of my heart 
to be far from you
is to die of longing.
There are other elements behind The Farm: continuity, conservatism, 
precise craftsmanship, and something the Catalans untranslatably call 
se
_En
.
By tradition, when Catalans reflect on themselves they get absorbed 
by the differences that set them off, individually and as a "nation," from 
the rest of Spain. Speculating about this Jet differential, as Barcelona's
great fin de siecle poet Joan Maragall called it, was a favorite intellectual 
sport in Miro's youth, filling countless essays. Usually the argument 
devolved, as such arguments will, into a play of stereotypes. Thus when 
Catalans looked at Castile, they saw sloth, privilege, and a morbid ten-
dency to inwardness, bred of long years of aristocratic effeteness; a taste 
for oppressing others, particularly Catalans; a lack of practical sense. 
The image of the Castilian as occupying leech, taxing the lifeblood out 
of Catalunya, was standard in Barcelona from the seventeenth century 
to the death of Franco in the late twentieth.
When Castilians looked at Catalans, they had their say too. Catalans 
were dull. They were pedantic and resentful by turns, usually both; too 
addicted to material things to understand the classic austerities of Castile,
let alone its spirituality; and inordinately self-satisfied with their patch 
of Mediterranean earth-a polity of grocers, barking at one another in 
a bastard language. No Catalan, in their view, could see beyond the pig 
in his yard, the fat angel sent to earth by God to supply Catalans with 
their daily viaticum of butifarra and ham.
When the Catalans observed themselves, it was a different story. 
Loyal, patriotic (as long as you understood that the patria was Catalunya, 
not the Iberian abstraction dear to Madrid centralists), practical, ingen-

ious, innovative though respectful of their roots, the whole mass of 
virtues leavened with just a xic of humor-what a people! For once, the 
Lord got it right, and though Catalans might not take their piety to the 
edge of superstition (like the Sevillians, say, who were practically Arabs 
anyhow), they had every right to praise Him for placing them on earth, 
armed with the virtues for which they were justly famous: continuitat, 
mesura, ironia, and seny.
That The Farm is conceived in praise of continuitat is evident enough. 
The farm is old and goes back for generations; its tools are traditional; 
it represents an unchanging order of work, dictated by seasons and
weather, by the fertility of the soil and the benignity of that strange, 
electric-blue sky. The same with mesura, for nothing in the painting lacks 
order, proportion, a sense of graded repetition. A clan that works stead-
fastly at the same task, down the generations, trusting in the work of 
the hand to make things tangible and spaces habitable, eschewing abstract 
speculation and fanciful enthusiasm-that family has mesura, and its 
members are the right kind of folk to belong on such a farm as this. 
Ironia is present in the copy of a French newspaper, L'Intransigeant, neatly 
folded and weighted down on the foreground by a watering can. It is 
the only foreign thing in the painting-a sign of Miro's destination, 
Paris, and of course a reference to cubism with its newsprint and cutoff 
headlines, but also a confession that he, in quitting the idealized Cata-
lunya of his ancestors, is being "intransigent" (the word is the same in 
Catalan), a stubborn prodigal son, the hereu, or "heir," leaving his birth-
right. Put continuitat, mesura, and ironia together, and you are on the 
way to seny.
Seny signifies, approximately, "common sense"; it means what Sam-
uel Johnson meant by "bottom," an instinctive and reliable sense of order, 
a refusal to go whoring after novelties. In traditional Catalan terms it
comes close to "natural wisdom" and is treated almost as a theological 
virtue. When the fifteenth-century Catalan metaphysical poet Ausias 
March wanted words to sum up his devotion to the unnamed woman 
his verses address, he called her either llir entre cards (lily among thistles) 
or lena de seny (woman full of wisdom). Catalans suppose that seny is 
their main national trait. It is to them what duende (literally "goblin," 
and by extension a sense of fatality or tragic unpredictability) is to more 
southern Spaniards. It is a country virtue, rising from the settled routines 
and inflexible obligations of rural life. In The Forms of Catalan Life 0944) 
Josep Ferrater Mora gave a lengthy disquisition on seny. "The man with 
seny is, primordially, the well-tempered man; that is to say, the man 
who contemplates things and human actions with a serene vision." It 
was the mirror reverse of Castilian quixotism. It was opposed to intel-
lectual overrefinement. Its inherent danger was being lowbrow. The 
pragmatic nature of sent', he thought, gave Catalans a markedly anti-
spiritual stamp and set their collective temperament somewhere between 
the puritan and the Faustian: "Faustian man or Romantic man are those 
to whom salvation and morality matter little; Puritan man is only con-
cerned with salvation and morals. The man of seny renounces neither 
salvation nor experience, and is always trying to set up a fruitful inte-
gration between both opposed, warring extremes."
Perhaps Catalan seny is, as Mora thought, antispiritual; this would
seem to be borne out by the recent experience of a Catalan friend who 
went home for Christmas to his native village and attended midnight 
mass with his relatives. The church was packed. The priest and deacon 
brought forth the image of the Infant Jesus so that everyone in the 
congregation could kiss its wooden feet. A long line began to shuffle 
toward the communion rail; so long, the priest realized, that it would 
be three in the morning before he got to dinner. There was a whispered 
confabulation. The deacon scurried into the sacristy and emerged with 
another wooden Jesus; two lines formed, and the kissing was over in 
half the time. Perhaps only in Catalunya, the first industrial region of 
Spain, could time-and-motion study be so quickly and instinctively ap-
plied to piety.
The relief from seny is rauxa. Rauxa means "uncontrollable emotion, 
outburst." It applies to any kind of irrational or Dionysiac or (sometimes) 
just plain dumb activity-getting drunk, screwing around, burning
churches, and disrupting the social consensus. The purpose of feast days 
is to give rauxa a sanctioned outlet: on Saint John's Night, in June, for 
instance, the whole of Catalunya is lighted by bonfires as its towns erupt 
in the continuous thunder of petardes, "fireworks," which go on until five 
or six in the morning. Not even in New York on the Fourth of July is 
the bombardment so intense. Rauxa and seny coexist like heads and tails 
on a coin; you cannot separate them, and the basic reason that Joan Mirfi 
is seen as so quintessentially a Catalan artist is that he displayed both 
at once in such abundance.
Probably the most pervasive cultural form of rauxa is an abiding taste 
for obscene humor: not so much sexual-or not more so, anyway, than 
in the United States and possibly rather less so than in the rest of 
Spain-as scatological. The Catalan preoccupation with shit would make 
Sigmund Freud proud; no society offers more frequent and shining 
confirmations of his theories of anal retention. In this respect, the Ca-
talans resemble other highly mercantile people such as the Japanese and 
the Germans.
The pleasures of a good crap are considered in Catalunya on a level 
with those of a good meal; "Menjar be i cagar fort / I no tingues por de la 
mort," goes the folk saying: "Eat well, shit strongly, and you will have 
no fear of death."
The image of shit has a festive quality unknown in the rest of Europe. 
On the Feast of the Kings, January 6, children who have been good the 
previous year are given pretty sweetmeats; the bad ones get caca i carbo,
"shit and coal," emblems of the hell that awaits them if they do not 
mend their childish ways. These days the coal is left out and the gift
consists of brown-marzipan turds made by confectioners, some elabo-
rately embellished with spun-sugar flies. Then there is the ti o, or "uncle," 
a cross between the French buche de Noel and the Mexican pifiata. This 
artificial log, filled with candy and trinkets, is produced amid great 
excitement at Christmas; the children whack it with sticks, exclaiming, 
"Caga, tiet, caga!" ("Shit, Uncle, shit!") until it breaks and disgorges its 
treasures.
If you find yourself in Barcelona just before Christmas, go to the 
Cathedral and browse the stalls that have been set up in front of its 
facade, where figures for the creche are sold. They are what you expect:
the shepherds, the Magi, Mary, Baby Jesus, the sheep, the oxen. But 
there is one who is a complete anomaly, met with nowhere else in the 
iconography of Christendom. A red Catalan cap, or barretina, flopping 
over his head, the fellow squats, breeches down, with a small brown 
cone of excrement connecting his bare buttocks to the earth. He is the 
immemorial fecundator, whom nature calls even as the Messiah arrives. 
Nothing can distract him from the archetypal task of giving back to the 
soil the nourishment that it supplied to him. He is known as the caganer, 
the "shitter," and he exists in scores of versions: some pop-eyed with 
effort, others rapt in calm meditation, but most with no expression at 
all; big paperr-mache ones three feet tall, minuscule terra-cotta ones with 
caca pyramids no bigger than mouse turds, and all sizes in between. 
During Christmas 1989, the Museum of Figueras held an exhibition of 
some five hundred caganrs, borrowed from private collections all over 
Catalunya. (There are, of course, collectors who specialize in them.) It 
was solemnly and equably reviewed in the Barcelona papers, with close-
up photos of one or two of the figures, just as one might wish to reproduce 
a David Smith totem or a nude by Josep Llimona. The origins of the 
caganer are veiled in antiquity and await the attentions of scholarship. 
Sixteenth-century sculptures of him exist, but he seems to be curiously 
absent from medieval painting. He is, essentially, a folk-art personage 
rather than a high-art one. His place is outside the manger, not inside 
the altarpiece. Yet he makes an unmistakable entrance into twentieth-
century art in the work of that great and shit-obsessed son of Catalunya, 
Joan Mirfi. If you look closely at The Farm, Montroig, you will see a pale 
infant squatting in front of the cistern where his mother is doing the 
washing. This boy is none other than the caganer of Miro's childhood 
Christmases; it may also be Mirfi himself, the future painter of Man and 
Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement (1935).
Nor can it be an accident that the other scatologist of modern paint-
ing, Salvador Dali, was a Catalan. Other Surrealists might shock the
French bourgeoisie (at least in the 1920s) but it was Dali's achievement 
to shock the Surrealists themselves, which he first did through his ex-
cremental imagery, profoundly offensive to the nostrils of Andre Breton: 
in 1929, when Dalf produced The Lugubrious Game, Breton and his col-
leagues felt obliged to hold a serious discussion on whether the stained 
shorts of the man holding a fishnet in the foreground were acceptable 
to the movement or not. I did not know Dalf well, but I remember a 
conversation with him in Paris twenty-five years ago, during which I 
asked him who, in his view, was the great unknown modernist artist 
(apart, of course, from himself). Joseph Pujol, he replied with a gust of 
carious breath and a flourish of the cane; only Joseph Pujol, Pujol forever. 
I had no idea who Joseph Pujol was. He turned out to be a forgotten, 
but in his time prodigious, star of the fin de siecle Parisian music hall: 
a Marseillais-but, as Dalf pointed out, with a Catalan name-who 
performed under the nickname of Le Petomane, the Fartomaniac. Pujol 
had a vast gas capacity and perfect control over his bowels and anal 
sphincter. Not only could he fart tunefully, but he could absorb a whole 
bowl of water on stage by sitting in it and drawing it up, like an Indian 
yogi. These, Dalf insisted, were not simply natural endowments, but 
the achievements of incessant practice and relentless discipline, like Ra-
phael's ability to draw. With them, Pujol would keep packed houses 
rolling in the aisles with renditions of popular airs, "La Marseillaise" 
and even snatches of Verdi and Offenbach. He would also imitate the 
posterior sounds of animals-the deep bass elephant, the gibbon, the 
mouse-and do character sketches, such as the imperious fart of the 
president of the Republic or the nervous squeak of the petite postulante 
de quatorze ans.
Just as some Catalans collect caganers, so there has always been a 
vigorous strain of scatological humor in their folk songs, folk poetry, 
and educated verse. Its antiquity refutes all Marxist efforts to explain it 
as a product of postindustrial bourgeois repression. (There are, however, 
a few Catalan Marxists who still believe this, as one might believe in the 
tooth fairy or the dictatorship of the proletariat.) It is preindustrial; it 
belongs to the long epoch during which the emissions of Barcelona, 
instead of rising into the Mediterranean air to form a noxious smog, lay 
thick on its streets. Indeed, it almost predates the streets themselves. 
The earliest names for the two rivers that bordered the medieval city of 
Barcelona were the Merdanga (shit stream) and the Cagallel (turd 
bearer), whose waters were totally unfit to drink by the fourteenth 
century and have remained so ever since. The first item in the invaluable 
collection of Versos Bruts (Coarse Poems, edited by Empar Perez-Cors) was
written in the early thirteenth century and takes the form of a discussion 
between two nobles, Arnaut Catalan and Ramon Berenguer V, count 
of Provence and Cerdanya, concerning a hundred noble ladies who went 
to sea in a boat and, becalmed, got back to shore by farting in chorus 
into its sails. One of the durable favorites of Catalan verse was Vicent 
Garcia (c. 158o-1623), rector of Vallfogona, a village in the Pyrenean 
foothills, who wrote sonnets in imitation of Luis de Gongora and Fran-
cisco Gomez de Quevedo, but whose real popularity depended on his 
burlesques, banned by the Inquisition. They included such works as To 
a Monumental Latrine, Constructed by the Author in the Garden of his Rectory 
and On a Delicate Matter, which roundly asserts that no person, however 
low, not even a Portuguese, could have anything bad to say about shit. 
Excrement, Garcia wrote in a Dalf-like transport of enthusiasm, is ben-
eficial, the sign of our true nature, a kind of philosophers' stone that 
"the pharmacists of Sarria / contemplate night and day." In doing so he 
evoked the peasant origins of the cult: shit as the great fertilizer, the 
farmer's friend, the emblem of root and place.
VI
"Real" Catalans-Catalans de sempre, as they sometimes call themselves, 
"Catalans since forever"-tend to be somewhat xenophobic, and the 
farther out in the country they are, the more they condescend to the 
foreigner. A Barcelonese friend of mine was recently driving past a tiny 
village in the Ampurdan in northern Catalunya-picturesque houses on 
a rocky hill, haystacks, a crumbling church-when she saw a peasant 
hoeing furrows by the side of the road: a weather-beaten figure straight 
out of the iconography of Catalan patriotism, wearing corduroy trousers, 
espadrilles, a faixa, or sash. She stopped, and they began to chat. How 
many other peasants lived in the village? Just him and his wife, said the 
peasant; all the other people had left. Then were the other houses empty? 
Most of the time-except on weekends. What happened on weekends? 
Foreigners came here in cars from the city, from the south. Did he know 
any of these weekenders? "Know them?" spat this emanation of folklore 
contemptuously. "How should I know them? Son tots moros-they're all 
Moors."
The key expression of xenophobia is violently loaded: xarnego. Orig-
inally, xarnego was fairly neutral and meant a Catalan whose parents 
came from different valleys. Then it shifted to "foreigner"; a peasant
living in one valley of the Ampurdan, for instance, would use it of a 
peasant from the other side of the hill. But with immigration, it came 
to denote-in the most pejorative sense-any working-class person of 
non-Catalan Spanish origin living in Catalunya. Today it has the same 
power of insult as "nigger" does in America, and if you call someone a 
xarnego in a bar, you will get the fight you are asking for. Immigrants, 
however, may call themselves xarnegos, jokingly or in ironic self-assertion, 
like blacks talking to other blacks about "us niggers."
In fact, though "old" Catalans find it hard to imagine why a Spanish 
immigrant should not want to be a Catalan, not all of them do. The 
mere fact of being Catalan confers no legal rights, obligations, or priv-

ileges in Catalunya. The legal definition of a Catalan, written into the 
province's short-lived Statute of Autonomy in 1932 and reaffirmed in 
1979, is very broad: "the political condition of Catalan" belongs to all 
Spanish citizens with "administrative residence" in any municipality of 
Catalunya. In the provincial and city elections of 1979-80, politicians 
representing migrant workers from Aragon and Andalusia demanded a 
new clause in the statute allowing immigrants to retain the political status 
of their region of birth. They did not get it.
Whatever the law may say, the popular definitions of a Catalan are 
all cultural and impossible to legislate. The basic one is language. No-
body can be considered Catalan unless he or she speaks Catalan naturally,
as a first-string language. To be a catalanoparlant is not necessarily 
enough, however. Even in the unlikely event that the Spanish resident 
speaks perfect Catalan, he may not be accepted as Catalan by 
everyone-Catalan fundamentalists are just as likely to view him as a 
foreigner who, like a dancing bear, has mastered an unnatural feat.
A decade ago, in the wake of Franco's death and the return of de-
mocracy to Catalunya, Barcelona experienced an outburst of militant 
linguistic Catalanism. Agitators demanded that the university teach only
texts written in (or translated into) Catalan-a sure recipe for academic 
disaster, since most of Spanish literature (let alone English, French, 
German, or Italian) would have been excluded by such a policy, while 
the chaos that Catalan exclusiveness would have produced in the study 
of the sciences hardly bears thinking about. Mostly the fuss came down 
to the public as inconvenience, particularly when enthusiasts spray 
painted street signs back into Catalan (carrer for calle) or scrawled "No al 
bilinguisme" across them, rendering them illegible to Catalans, Castilians, 
and foreigners alike.
This militancy seems to be spent now. It holds out on the margins 
of intellectual life, but its energy is clearly lost in a time of transition.
It is still possible to find curious superpatriotic anthologies, collections 
of uplifting Catalanist sentiments culled from the work of eighteenth-
to twentieth-century writers. A durable paperback of nationalist poems 
and songs includes such ludicrous gems as an "Ode to the Fatherland, 
Sung by Its Unborn Sons," written in 1923 by one Oriol Casassas, 
whose muse smote him with a vision of serried ranks of Catalan fetuses 
chanting lustily in their wombs. "Umbilicoses cintes," it begins,
ens lliguen a la mare
i liquids amni6tics ens banyen a pleret:
Ob Pdtria pressentida, desconeguda encara, 
fins que serem a terme 1 el claustre fara net! 
Umbilical cords link us to our mothers 
and amniotic fluids softly bathe us:
Oh Fatherland we imagine, still unknown to us
until we come to term, and the womb will be empty!
This might go over well with the wife of Jordi Pujol, who is one of the 
leaders of the Catalan antiabortion movement, but otherwise it is hard 
to imagine anyone reading such stuff today, let alone writing it.
Or is it? Efforts by nationalists to impose Catalan on unwilling speak-
ers do happen in the Generalitat. The most recent-a political embar-
rassment for Pujol and his party-occurred in January 1991, when the
minister of social welfare, Antoni Comas, circulated a memo to his staff 
rebuking them for their habit of speaking Spanish to one another, even 
though they spoke Catalan to him. This unpatriotic custom, he warned, 
"must be rooted out." The document, leaked to the press, caused a 
scandal. Big Brother, it seemed, was alive and well on Playa Sant Jaume. 
Comas then tried to blame the memo on bad shorthand by his secretary, 
claiming that he never said any such thing. Eventually Pujol had to step 
in and publicly disown the memo.
When the Statute of Autonomy declared Catalan to be the official 
language of Catalunya, it gave a tremendous boost to Catalan translation 
and publication. In 1939, the year Franco banned the language, not a
single book was published in Catalan. In 1942 there were four and in 
1950 thirteen. The year 1975 saw 611 titles, and then the figures began 
to zoom, reaching about 4,20o new titles in Catalan in 1988. Moreover, 
Barcelona publishes more new books in Spanish than Madrid does. 
Between them the two cities account for 8o percent of all publishing in 
Spain.
But especially in Catalan-language publishing, the number of book 
titles is misleading. The number of copies sold is what counts, and since 
the whole readership is bilingual, the actual market for books in Catalan
is only a fraction of the demand for those in Spanish. And the majority 
of Spaniards, including Catalans, do not read much beyond the papers 
and magazines. They are passive television watchers, like Americans. 
Recent surveys indicate that six out of ten of them, in 1990, did not buy 
a single new book. Since about three and a half million of the six million 
catalanoparlants can actually read the language, the largest imaginable 
sales base for Catalan book publishing cannot be more than two million 
people; actually it is much less. Hence the paradox: there are enough 
people to make an audience for Catalan television as long as the govern-
ment pays for it, but not enough to support a "national" Catalan liter-
ature. No serious imaginative writer can make a decent living from the 
sales of his or her books in Catalan alone, unsupported by journalism; 
none ever has. Barcelona's bookshops all have their Catalan and Spanish 
sections, side by side, reflecting the bilingualism of their clients; there 
is one big specialist Catalan bookshop on Gran Via, called Ona, which 
stocks a wide range of texts on Catalan history, sociology, literature, 
folklore, cooking, and erotica and of international writing translated into 
Catalan, but nothing at all in Spanish. Not a few of these books have 
been helped to press by government grants, but as the novelist Lluis 
Goytisolo pointed out, "In the long term, and even in the medium run, 
the existence of a literature founded on grants has to be mortally 
endangered."
Goytisolo's situation is perhaps an instructive one. He is one of a 
number of highly gifted Catalan writers in their fifties who grew up in 
the Franco period writing in Spanish. Others include his brother Juan,
Jaime de Bledma, Eduardo Mendoza, Manuel Vasquez Montalbin, Car-
los Barral, Ana Maria Matute, and Jose Agustin. All of them were 
strongly anti-Franco; Lluis Goytisolo suffered imprisonment for his 
ideas. They were all living in a city that, Goytisolo argued, had a very 
meager literary tradition in its own right until the nineteenth century. 
Only one of the classic medieval Catalan writers, Bernat Metge, actually 
came from Barcelona: Ramon Llull was Majorcan; Joanot Martorell and 
Ausias March were both from Valencia. Not until the late nineteenth 
century, with the emergence of the poets Jacint Verdaguer and Joan 
Maragall, did Catalanism in Barcelona find an important literary aspect, 
but at a time when the mere fact of writing in Catalan was regarded as 
a patriotic act, most "patriotic" poetry was exalted kitsch. Nevertheless, 
with the single exception of Josep Pla, most of the important writing in
Catalan between 19oo and the Second Republic (I q3 1) was poetry by 
such writers as Guerau de Lliost, Josep Carrier, Josep Sagarra, and, 
above all, Josep Foix. And Catalunya had never produced much literature 
in Spanish, except for the obscure Renaissance poet Juan BoscAn.
The Franco regime in Catalunya, therefore, not only gave the then-
voung writers of Goytisolo's generation a new subject matter of exile, 
loss, confrontation, and social change to deal with; by banning Catalan, 
it forced them into the mainstream of Spanish writing. Being a left-wing 
writer entailed the desire to reach a worker audience-and most of the 
industrial workers in Barcelona were immigrants who spoke Spanish, 
not Catalan. The Barcelonese middle class, a traditional audience for 
literature, was bilingual and, on the whole, preferred to read Spanish. 
This sudden irruption of Catalan writers into Spanish literature seemed, 
to Goytisolo, "a new phenomenon in the history of Spanish literature," 
one that coincided with the emergence of Barcelona as the capital of 
Spanish publishing. The Spanish minister of culture, a Catalan named 
Jordi Sole Tura, takes the reasonable view that "I have always believed 
that Catalan culture is what happens in Catalunya in Catalan and in 
Spanish. The reductionism of saying `We only care about culture if it's 
in Catalan' strikes me as a grave mistake." On the other hand, pro-
Pujolist Catalan fundamentalists like the JNC (Nationalist Youth of Ca-
talunya) still fiercely support just this kind of reductionism. "We have 
to affirm," one of their manifestos ran in 1 99 1 , "that not all the culture 
one has in Catalunya is Catalan culture, and if we recognize writers like 
Goytisolo and Marse as belonging to Catalan culture, we might as well 
do the same for Robert Graves, who wrote in English from Majorca." 
Intellectuals were always the first to abandon their ideals, the JNC 
complained, and "When a young writer announces that he has decided 
to create in Spanish ... he does something more than make a personal 
choice; he sends society a message of abandonment, renunciation and 
materialism."
Catalan and Spanish coexist in print journalism and on television. 
Barcelona has three public television channels, one broadcasting entirely 
in Catalan (TV3), one mostly in Spanish (TVEi), and one half-and-half
(TVEZ); the total of prime-time broadcasting hours divides almost 
equally between the two languages. Little Catalan TV3 carries ads but 
is subsidized by the Catalan government. It started in 1984-the David 
to big Spanish TVE's rather sclerotic Goliath. Before long TV3 showed 
itself to be livelier in editing, visually sharper, tougher in reporting and 
interviewing, and more acute in commentary than its rival. It is probably 
the best example of true regional television in Europe. Its audience is
attached to it for reasons that go beyond passive entertainment: a 1986 
survey showed that more than half of TV 3's watchers had a "patriotic 
attachment" to it, while 86 percent felt it was worth watching because 
it improved their grasp of Catalan; most concurred that its reports were 
more "politically objective" than those of TVE. With some hesitation, 
advertisers got behind T V 3 in the 1 98os, and the annual number of 
espots, or "commercials," in Catalan went from 5,468 in 1984 to more 
than 44,000 in 1988.
A similar pattern of choice exists among the newspapers. Of the five 
Barcelona dailies, three (El Periodico, La Vanguardia, and El Pais) are in 
Spanish, and two (Avui and Diari de Barcelona) in Catalan. The Spanish
papers have about 1.3 million readers among them, the Catalan ones 
fewer than 25o,ooo. But El Pais and La Vanguardia both publish regular 
cultural supplements-reviews of books, art, theater, movies-in Ca-
talan, which suggests that as far as the press is concerned, Catalan in 
Barcelona is mainly a language for the upscale, the university educated, 
the cultivated.
But these are the very people who most need to communicate with 
the rest of Europe, and nobody can do that in Catalan. The hope that 
a uniquely Europe-oriented culture could be created around a minority
language like Catalan worked as long as Barcelona was a nucleus of liberal 
ferment, the one spearhead of an open society in an otherwise black, 
inward-turning, authoritarian Spain. That long moment lasted from the 
mid-196os to Franco's death. It is gone, for the general Europeanization 
of Spain, especially of Madrid, has been an accomplished fact for at least 
ten years. If immigration to Catalunya from the rest of Spain stabilizes 
at roughly its present level, and if local governments continue their 
policies of encouraging Catalan language use-in education and on 
television-Catalan will certainly remain the common vernacular of Ca-
talunya and draw its strength, as it always has, from that. If not, not: 
it could slowly decompose, dropping out of use, as Latin did.
Moreover, it may be that the very idea of a language-based, political 
Catalan consciousness will slip gradually into the background in years 
to come, since the oppression that enabled it to define itself against Franco
in the 197os has gone forever. The sense of exclusion recedes as Catalan 
politicians acquire more influence on the national stage of Spain: at 
present, the second most powerful politician in Madrid, after Felipe 
Gonzalez himself, is a Catalan-the vice-president, the former mayor 
of Barcelona, Narcis Serra. The man who succeeded him as socialist 
mayor of Barcelona in 1982, and is still in office after a ten-year term, 
is Pasqual Maragall.
Maragall's administration is radically changing the physical form of Bar-
celona. It set out to undo the damage the Porcioles years had left on its 
fabric and, where possible, to make the city a more agreeable place to 
be; at the cost of a certain surrender to the public-relations zeitgeist of 
the 198os, not to mention a loss of whatever meaning the word "socialist" 
might once have had, it succeeded.
In the mid-198os, the hopes of Maragall's people in the Ajuntament, 
or city hall, were infectious. Coming from New York, a city that had 
begun resigning itself to entropy, I couldn't help envying them, feeling 
enchanted by their optimism. "This is the omphalos," Margarita Obiols, 
a city hall staffer who later became the head of the Olimpiada Cultural, 
said to me in 1985: "Barcelona is going to be the center of Mediterranean 
culture." Problems could be cut through, alliances forged, investment 
pulled in, the gray city renewed like the phoenix-all through urban 
renewal and its emblem, the public artwork. The last time Barcelona 
had flung itself into such a convulsion of replanning and sprucing up to 
feed its own self-confidence and attract the gaze of Europe had been a 
hundred years before, under its mayor Francesc de Paula Rius i Taulet, 
who orchestrated its 1888 Universal Exposition.
The visitor to Barcelona in late 1991, seeing the signs of hurry to 
get things in place for the 1992 Olympic Games, was apt to suppose 
that the city's whole renewal program had been keyed to that event. 
Not so: though Barcelona's role as host came as a huge civic boost when 
Maragall got back from Lausanne in 1986 with the games in his pocket, 
the policy of revamping the city itself was fixed several years before that 
and was expected even then to continue until the ominous year of the 
millennium, 20oo. Essentially, the argument of Maragall, of his pred-
ecessor Narcis Serra, and of their political team-made up mainly of 
Catalan soixante-huitards in their thirties and forties, who had been ex-
cluded from the smallest access to the political levers until 1975 and 
were now determined to reverse everything the dictator's culture had 
done to the city-went as follows.
First, general matters of nationalism, both Catalan and Spanish. "A 
Catalan who claims to be a Catalanist but does not like nationalism," 
Maragall said in a speech at Saint Antony's College in Oxford in 1986,
"finds himself in a somewhat difficult position. But it is my position." 
The minority call for a completely independent Catalan state-the paisos 
Catalans, embracing Valencia, the Balearic Islands, and even the Rous-
sillon, or French Catalunya-was a romantic idea, popular among the 
young who needed some issue through which to contest the existing 
political system: "It is almost the only ideology that does not fit into the 
Spanish Constitution." But it was not going to come true. Catalunya 
was part of Spain. Maragall's grandfather, the poet, had written his 
"Oda a 1'Espanya" in the aftermath of 1898 and the humiliating loss of 
Cuba and the Philippines to the United States. Rebuking centralist Spain 
for its neglect of its former peoples and for its ignorance of Catalunya, 
Joan Maragall wrote:
On ets, Espanya?-No et veig enlloc. 
No sents la meva veu entronadora?
No entens aquesta llengua-que et parla entre perills? 
Has desapres d'entendre an els teus fills?
Adeu, Espanya!
Where are you, Spain?-nowhere in sight. 
Don't you hear my resounding voice?
Don't you understand this language, speaking to you between risks? 
Have you left off listening to your sons?
Farewell, Spain!
But nearly a century later, his grandson argued, Barcelona could not 
escape Spain or say farewell to it. After nearly forty years of Franco's 
insisting that his ideology was the essence of Spain, that everything else
was foreign and un-Spanish, Spain must (as it were) re-Hispanicize itself, 
draw a self-definition that includes openness; Barcelona should lead the 
way in this not because of its Catalan "essence" but because of its ori-
entation to a more liberal northern Europe. Moreover, young Maragall 
could not accept the Pujolist line that there was an immutable essence 
of Catalunya to which Barcelona was somehow foreign. Barcelona had 
created Catalunya, not the other way around. And it had a natural, 
competitive affinity with other cities in Europe: once Spain joined the 
Common Market, Barcelona was destined to be "the link that will attach 
the Iberian peninsula to the urban European axis that goes from London 
to Milan." Maragall saw Barcelona as the future capital of what he called 
"the north of the south of Europe," connected with Montpellier, Mar-
seilles, Toulouse. Its connections would be industrial and cultural, not 
rural; the mayor and his colleagues in city hall were convinced, not 
surprisingly, of the primacy of cities. The Generalitat-like other gov-
ernments in the European Economic Community, notably France's-
taxed the city to subsidize the country; the Catalan parliamentary system,
again like other European systems, gave an unfair weight to territorial 
representation over population. Hence the laws favored rural interests 
-paying for subsidized farm surpluses, for instance-at the city's ex-
pense, and were keyed to more conservative views than most people 
actually held. "In my opinion," said Maragall,
Europe has to recover a certain urban militancy. Paying for food sur-
pluses is expensive and has to be done every year. Paying for the cities 
is also expensive, but cities are already there: they are not produced 
yearly. A Europe, a world seen as a set of nations are slower, with 
more opposed languages, than a Europe and a world seen as a system 
of cities. Cities have no frontiers, no armies, no customs, no immigra-
tion officials. Cities are places for invention, for creativity, for freedom. 
The first thing to be reinvented was the city itself, and no European 
capital in recent years has made such a point of reinventing itself as has 
Barcelona. However the bill is eventually paid, the scale of the work is 
pharaonic. In some ways it matches the rapid enlargement of the city 
into the grid plan designed by the engineer Ildefons Cerda a hundred 
years before: the Eixample. Each time, Barcelona made a convulsive leap 
of growth after a long period of urban neglect and repression. Each time, 
it had to start from the ground up. No city gives its planners a clean 
slate, but sometimes a large chance of rethinking does come along, and 
that was what happened to Barcelona after the death of Franco.
For twenty years-and still today-one of the worst urban experi-
ences Barcelona offers is that of leaving it: all traffic north has to go 
through the bottleneck of the Via Meridiana, and southbound traffic 
must exit by either the Diagonal or the Gran Via. At rush hours and 
during the festes that speckle the Spanish calendar, these become glaciers 
of simmering metal, and the main roads of the urban center are so jammed 
that cars and trucks move at an average speed of about five miles an 
hour. To relieve this, the city is constructing two beltways: one, the 
Ronda del Mar, carrying traffic (mostly underground) from the Llobregat 
to the Besos on the seaward side of the city; the other, the Ronda de 
Muntanya, doing the same along the flank of the Collserola massif. If 
they are not ready for 1992, the Olympic Games will plunge Barcelona 
into previously unheard-of depths of traffic congestion; wisely, the Ajun-
tarnent's pamphlet on the subject of urban macrorenewal is entitled La 
Barcelona del93.
If circulation in Barcelona is horrible, it is partly because parking is 
insufficient. The city has more than 6oo,ooo cars but only 432,000 park-
ing spaces, of which 4 in 1 o are on public streets and the rest in private
lots. This means that at any time of the day or night at least 16o,ooo 
vehicles in the metropolitan area are either illegally parked of looking 
for a slot. Those who have not driven in Barcelona (except, perhaps, 
those rash enough to try to keep a car in Manhattan) cannot imagine the 
vileness of civic temper that rises from this situation. Most public trans-
port is by bus. The subway's main line finishes near the university on 
the Diagonal; thus half the work force enters the city by car. On week-
days, the average speed of motor traffic is twelve miles per hour. Given 
the wear and tear this inflicts on the central nervous system, it is not 
surprising that the accident rate in Barcelona increased in the 1 98os. 
Catalan drivers are bad, impatient, and (it seems) getting worse. In 
1 980-86, the accident rate in downtown Barcelona shot up by 40 percent; 
in 1987 there were ten thousand vehicle accidents with thirteen thousand 
casualties.
There is only so much that the Ajuntament can do to cure this 
situation. The ring roads will certainly help, and so will the twenty-five 
new underground municipal parkings (at present, the city has forty) that
will add fifteen thousand new parking places by 1993. Rather gingerly, 
the Ajuntament plans to install a computer-controlled system of traffic 
direction, governing the rhythm of traffic lights and showing information 
on such matters as parking density and traffic flow on luminous roadside 
panels; but if this is done, it will be completed by closer to 2000 than 
by 1992. In the meantime, the Ajuntament may be getting ready to ban 
traffic from the center (but which part of the center?) of Barcelona or 
charge a per-car fee to enter the city; in 1991 Maragall told a reporter 
from La Vanguardia, "The citizens would be happy if the politicians tried 
solutions of that sort." This seems unlikely.
All cities have a city below them-the infrastructure that carries 
sewage, electricity, phone lines, and other services. Barcelona's was 
inefficient and large: it included slightly more than six hundred miles of
major drains and sewers, many of them dating back to the eighteenth 
century and some to the fifteenth. Ever since the days of Dr. Pedro 
Garcia Faria, the late-nineteenth-century Catalan sanitary engineer who 
mounted a campaign for public health in the face of the city's regular 
epidemics of cholera, typhoid, and malaria, the drains of Barcelona have 
been a difficult civic issue-property owners resented excavation for new 
ones, and the completion of a major sewer was regarded as such a political 
coup that a mayor once held a banquet for a hundred and fifty dignitaries, 
by the light of carbide lamps, in his newly finished underground col-
lector. Perhaps because of the traditional Catalan penchant for the sca-
tological, Barcelona's city administrations like to flaunt their sewer work,
and Maragall's is no exception: the Ajuntament recently filled the winter 
garden of the Citadel Park with a large didactic exhibition called "Bar-
celona Sub," explaining in detail the new, visitable ducts, trunk collec-
tors, and recycling plants, its catalog filled with archaeological, 
hydrographic, and bacteriologic data and embellished with quotations 
from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, rendered in Catalan ("Time present 
and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future")-surely the 
most recherche use of Old Possum's legacy ever devised, but one that 
illustrates the Ajuntament's belief in the symbiosis of high and low 
culture.
What was the frame of Barcelona? Land and sea. But the land behind 
the city was the Collserola Hills, hardly used at all by the Barcelonans 
themselves-except for the old funfair at Tibidabo-while the sea, cur 
iously enough, was almost inaccessible to them. The city had sealed off 
its own way of life from the sea by a cluttered industrial port with scant 
marina facilities and the virtual annihilation of any kind of social use of 
the coast that ran northeast to the mouth of the Bes6s River. Anywhere 
else, this could have been prime recreational ground. In Barcelona it 
was waste-the beaches fouled with industrial effluents, access to them 
prevented by a tangle of obsolete factories, railroad tracks, yards, and 
dumps around the nineteenth-century industrial area of Poblenou. The 
Ajuntament's plan is to open up the Collserola Hills as parkland, and 
reclaim the whole waterfront of Poblenou between the Citadel Park and 
the Old Cemetery-about 250 acres, or the equivalent in area of fifty 
blocks of the Eixample-as a sports, recreation, and housing area. It 
would first be used as the Olympic Village (housing for fifteen thousand 
athletes) at the 1992 games, and then-or so the mayor announced back 
in 1986-sold at "low, competitive" prices as a housing development for 
ten thousand people. In the process, five kilometers of public-access 
beachfront north toward the Bes6s River would be created, along with 
five seafront parks. The main business developments were two forty-
two-story skyscrapers overlooking the water, one for offices, the other 
a hotel. Thus Poblenou would become Barcelona's new "maritime fa-
cade." It was, in short, the kind of urban-clearance project that in the 
United States today would bog down in the courts for years, as one 
special-interest group after another whittled away at it. In Barcelona it 
was pushed through fast, with a large boost from private money. The 
overseeing architects for the Olympic Village were the firm of Bohigas, 
Martorell and Mackay. A year away from the Olympics, the immense 
Poblenou project was so far from completion that its architectural quality 
could hardly be judged, but as town planning, it looked admirable and
excited only one cavil. This concerns its name, Nova Icaria-New Icaria. 
Icaria was the name that nineteenth-century followers of the Utopian 
socialist Etienne Cabet, some of them Catalans, gave to the ideal workers' 
community of the future, which some of them tried-and abjectly 
failed-to found in the United States. The Olympic Village scheme has 
absolutely nothing to do with worker housing, for no blue-collar family 
could afford to buy one of its pricey apartments; you might as well call 
an upscale condo block in Berlin the Rosa Luxemburg Tower. The "low" 
prices Maragall spoke of in 1986 turned out, by 1 99 1 , to be quite high 
-about a quarter of a million pesetas per square meter, or $250 per 
square foot.
In all, by 1992 Barcelona will have spent about two hundred billion 
pesetas (some two billion dollars) on buildings and infrastructure asso-
ciated with the Olympic Games. Parallel with the recovery of the coast
goes the reclaiming of Montjuic, site of the Olympic Ring and the track 
and indoor events of the 1992 games. In 1929, the main ceremonial 
buildings of the Barcelona World's Fair decreed by the dictator Miguel 
Primo de Rivera, such as the huge Palau Nacional, which now houses 
the Museum of Catalan Art, were pitched on and near Montjuic-where 
their gross monumentality contrasted with the abstract, almost ethereal 
lines of Mies van der Rohe's German pavilion, which, after its demo-
lition, remained one of the ruling ghosts or absent classics of modernism. 
In the mid-198os the Ajuntament reconstructed Mies's building as ac-
curately as it could from drawings and photos, and it restored that likable 
remnant of the 1929 Exposition, the light-show fountain on the downhill 
axis between the Palau Nacional and Playa d'Espanya. But Montjuic still 
felt like no-man's-land, not exactly a park, nor in any satisfactory way 
an urban center. It has been pulled together by the Olympic Ring, the 
official name for the redesign of a large slice of the mountain, under the 
general control of the architects Federico Correa and Alfonso Mild. 
They carefully preserved the facade of the old oval stadium with its 
classicizing bronze sculptures by Pau Gargallo-one of the better ex-
amples of twentieth-century European dictatorial architecture-but 
lowered the level of the sports track by some thirty-five feet, thus 
giving more room for raked seats: enough for seventy thousand spec-
tators. From this excellent conversion, one descends by stairs and plazas 
to the most distinguished new building associated with the Olympics: 
the Palau Sant Jordi, or Palace of Saint George, a roofed sports arena 
seating seventeen thousand spectators, designed by the Japanese architect 
Arata Isozaki.
From outside, the palau's low profile and its dark gray-glazed ceramic
roof pierced with porthole skylights give it the air of a grounded flying 
saucer. But inside, the ground-hugging effect is dramatically reversed: 
the vast roof, a curved metal space frame, soars over the arena, its 
structural daring turned into near weightlessness by the light pouring 
through the array of round holes above. Here, high tech turns into 
architectural poetry, as it does in Norman Foster's eight-hundred-foot 
telecommunications tower, rising like a lance from the Collserola Hills 
near Tibidabo.
None of the other stadiums, tracks, swimming pools, and offices 
built for the Olympics compare with Isozaki's arena, but in terms of 
urbanism the Olympic project was, from Barcelona's point of view, more
a means of priming the pump than an end in itself. For Barcelona's sense 
of neighborhood and the fabric of its past has recently begun to change. 
Porcioles's city had been based on zoning. They new city hall was 
persuaded by its chief urban theorist, the architect and historian Oriol 
Bohigas, that this was not the way to go. Instead-as Maragall put it 
in a speech to the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1986-Bar-
celona should decentralize, even within the center of the city itself. "This 
meant," he said, "giving up zoning and looking for a city in which all 
activities coexisted." What this rather cloudy idea signified was not that 
the Ajuntament would put factories back in the Barri Gotic, but that 
the center should not be exclusively showcased at the expense of the 
periphery and that run-down and shapeless areas all over town should 
be brought back with what Maragall termed "a set of urban spaces-
parks, squares-of high urban and design quality throughout the city." 
Thus, the Ajuntament hoped, by thinking in terms of individual projects 
instead of a general plan, the city could be retuned. The idea was to 
reassert the claims of the barri, the "neighborhood," many of which were 
the remnants of a distinct village from Barcelona's far past, as the city's 
traditional social unit.
At first, this was done with the help of a public sculpture program, 
linked to restoration of the squares and arcades, the open spaces and 
gardens, which were the lungs of the neighborhood. No amount of new
sculpture will tart up a socially dead space, and the day of the official 
monument was past-especially in Spain, where the very idea reeked 
of Franco. So city hall decided to approach sculptors and get them 
together with architects to work on spaces that needed invigoration, 
sometimes with the aim of provoking memory, but always with a view 
to engaging the people of the barri.
Barcelona's sculpture-in-public-space program was largely de vi	e 
by a member of Maragall's staff at the Ajuntament, an energetic be /view
a man named Josep Acebillo. It is the largest of any Western city's, a 
unique anthology, and it could only come about because the artists-
some Spanish, others American or English or French-agreed to work 
for a fraction of their usual market price, with all costs of making and 
installing assumed by the Ajuntament. The scheme acquired such a 
cachet that there are now more than seventy such projects completed in 
the metropolitan area of Barcelona. A few are straight revival-the re-
placement of sculptures that had been dismantled for political reasons 
during the Franco period but fortunately not destroyed; one of these is 
the monument to the Catalanist mayor of Barcelona Bartolomeu Robert 
i Yarzabal, the base designed by Gaudi and the bronze figures by Josep 
Llimona, which now stands in Playa de Tetuan; another is the bronze 
commemorating Rafael Casanova, a hero of the 1714 siege of Barcelona, 
which was found in storage and then reerected on the Ronda de Sant 
Pere. But most were made for their sites by, or to the design of, living 
artists, and they tend to eschew the oratorical distance and single-minded 
speech of official monuments. You must peer and puzzle at the giant 
still life of cubist shapes inside the glass box, streaming with water and 
rippling with reflection, that Antom Tapies raised as a monument to 
Picasso, next to the fern house of the Citadel Park. Xavier Corbero's 
array of carved marble blades and fins in the Plaga de Soller-a lake 
apparition with faint echoes of the Fontana di Trevi-is generously 
urbane, completing rather than dominating the square and the lake. 
Beverly Pepper got a whole park adjacent to the long-disused Estacio 
del Nord and turned it into a huge earthwork on and around which 
children play: their favorite part of it is Fallen Sky, a whaleback hill rising 
from the green turf, sheathed in slabs of cobalt and turquoise ceramic. 
The most "monumental" of the projects so far, the last big work of Joan 
Miro, could not be less authoritarian: a lunar, massive torso with a horned 
cylinder of a head, ponderous but also silly in its dignity, a moon calf 
dropped from Brobdingnag. Its bovine appearance neatly refers to its 
urban context near the Arenas bullring. Sixty feet high, sheathed in the 
trencadis, or "broken tiles," that pay Miro's homage to Gaudi, it is best ' 
seen from the lower levels of the Parc de 1'Escorxador, rising oneirically 
above the rows of palm trees planted by the project's designer, Beth 
Gali. Not every project works as well as these, and several are banal, 
like the incoherent Homage to the Universal Exhibition of 1888 stuck on a 
prime site in the Citadel Park by Antoni Clave, a painter without sculp-
tural talent, but a Catalan.
One of the habits, almost a reflex, of Porcioles's planners was to 
prefer the car to the foot. Thus, without explanation, one of the city's
most liked promenades, the Rambla de Sant Andreu, was closed to 
pedestrians in November 1969; all its trees were cut down and it became 
a highway. But Barcelona is a walker's city, despite its inflexible grid. 
Its "natural" patterns pertain to the square and the barri, not the beltway 
and the ramp. One of the things that strikes the foreigner there-behind 
the smog, the din, and the traffic-is the social importance assigned to 
strolling and the reality of its pedestrian etiquette. Passeig de Gracia is 
one of the great promenades of the world, an expression of social con-
sensus, as are the Ramblas and the Giiell Park. It is a city in which one 
still sees things from eve level, on foot; where there is always a collective 
instinct to browse. Thus, recovering the street as promenade became a 
high priority in the 198os. The Ajuntament restored the Rambla de Sant 
Andreu and brought back the generous axis of the Passeig Lluis Com-
panys, between the Arch of Triumph built for the 1888 Exposition and 
the gates of the Citadel Park; it banished cars from the diagonal Avinguda 
de Gaudi that links those twin masterpieces of modernisme, Gaudf's Sa-
grada Familia and the Hospital of the Holy Cross and Saint Paul by 
Domenech i Montaner. It began to repair plazas in the Old City, large 
and small, that had fallen into decay: Plaga dels Angels, Plaga de Sant 
Augusti Vell, and a dozen others. It recycled old buildings into new 
uses. The medieval Convent dels Angels, long since abandoned, became 
the new site of the Hemeroteca Municipal, Barcelona's archive of news-
papers and journals. The neoclassical Casa de la Caritat, disused since 
1956, is to be fixed up by the American architect Richard Meier as a 
center for contemporary art. The Editorial Montaner i Simon, designed 
by Domenech i Montaner, is recycled as a museum for the work of 
Barcelona's most famous living painter, Antoni Tapies-a project that 
strikes some critics who are not Catalan as tinged by nationalistic piety. 
In 1989, the Ajuntament struck a deal with the monks of the great Gothic 
monastery of Pedralbes and began to convert their fourteenth-century 
dormitory into an exhibition space for part of the Thyssen Collection, 
lent but not given to Barcelona.
But for the returning visitor who may, perhaps, have come to the 
city a decade ago, the quickly visible change is not on the large scale of 
planning, or even in the conversion projects, but in the texture and detail
of the streetscape. The work done to clean, restore, and strip false 
accretions from the historical facades of Barcelona has been long and 
resolute. This is especially true of buildings from the modernist decades, 
1870-191 o, ignored by Porcioles and his colleagues. Gaudf's Casa Mila 
is a pale golden sea cliff again, not the dark hulk it had become; the 
Monet-like mosaic facade of his Casa Bat11o glitters, and its foyer is once
again a cool blue grotto; next door, every red-and-gold luster tile on the 
stepped Dutch pediment of Puig i Cadafalch's Casa Amatller twinkles 
in the oblique morning light. Unnoticed details spring out as you walk 
around the Eixample and the Barri Gotic: the whiplash frame of a 19oo 
doorway with its green mosaic inserts that had been too grimy to see; 
a spitting iron dragon returned to its bracket; the clutter of neon and 
plastic stripped from a neoclassical facade on the Ramblas. And then 
there are larger projects, such as Oscar Tusquets's superbly informed 
and sensitive remodeling of the Palau de la Musica Catalana, which-
being a highly charged emblem of Catalan independence-had been left 
to decay during the Franco years.
Not all of this is paid for by the Ajuntament: the Generalitat, for 
instance, put in half a billion pesetas (five million dollars) toward the 
Palau de la Mfisica, the same amount for Gae Aulenti's remodeling of
Jthe Museum of Catalan Art-which critics await with trepidation, re-
membering what an overwrought monster she made of the Musee d'Or-
say in Paris-and eight hundred million pesetas (eight million dollars) 
for the Museum of Contemporary Art. But most of the impulse for 
preservation came from Maragall's administration in the late 198os, and 
especially from Oriol Bohigas, the architect-historian whose essential 
role was to supply what one might call the ideology of preservation, and 
ose Acevillo, his successor from 1985 on.
Taste cannot be legislated, but at least the integrity of the past can 
be. With the guidance of Bohigas and other conservation-minded ar-
chitects, Barcelona in the 198os developed the strictest historical pres-
ervation code of any city in Europe.
The code specifically protects 86o "Buildings, Elements and Groups" 
in Barcelona on the grounds of historical significance. Most of them (578, 
or 67 percent) are in the Old City, while 134 more, or 15 percent, are
in the Eixample. The rest are split between the ten other electoral dis-
tricts of Barcelona, from Sarria (49 items, or nearly 6 percent) to the 
industrial quarter of Sant Andreu, which has 4 items considered worth 
protecting. What seems remarkable about the code, at least to the for-
eigner, is not just its rigor but its conceptual inclusiveness. It sets out 
five levels for protected buildings. Those at level A are "of a singular 
character, which, because of their great architectural value, are consid-
ered as monuments"-like Gaudi's Sagrada Familia or Domenech's Palau 
de la Mfisica Catalana. For these, "protection is total," and no additions 
of any kind may be made to them. At level B are buildings of type A 
that have been altered in the past and must be brought back. Level C
-the commonest in the Eixample-are those "whose value lies mainly 
in their characteristic structure, outwardly expressed in the facade." 
Level D applies to structures of facade interest only; and the lowest, E, 
contains ones with isolated "elements of interest"-a fine staircase, a 
skylight, unusual molding.
Essentially, the new code puts the onus on the property holder. 
Before he can touch a brick, the owner of a building must prove to the 
Ajuntament's satisfaction that it is not of historical significance. He must
provide "documentary evidence that the building in question does not 
possess the following characteristics," signs of possible value that are so 
broad as to make change all but impossible, such as these traits of a 
street facade:
The surface of the facade generated by its alignment; vertical hierarchy 
with the lower floors and cornice or finial standing out; the existence 
of symmetrical axes subordinating the general composition. The pre-
dominance of solid wall over opening. The general layout of the open-
ings according to vertical composition axes with the presence of 
projecting elements such as balconies ...
Then the code moves to details, forbidding the developer to alter 
any building in the Historic Preservation District that shows, among 
other things,
The presence ... of decorative architectural elements, reliefs or sculp-
tural forms, paintings, sgraito, stucco, ceramics, carpentry, leaded 
lights, ironwork, and applied arts in general. The use of fine materials 
such as stone, marble, wood, etc. The presence of singular fixtures, 
such as screens ...
The existence of structural or building elements indicative of the period 
of technological transition which characterized the construction process 
of the historic Example, important both for the recovery of traditional 
techniques (vaults, brickwork, etc.) and for the introduction of new 
materials (cast-iron columns and the early use of iron).
The code works somewhat to the advantage of traditional Catalan 
crafts-ceramics, iron forging, high-grade joinery, glass-which were 
dying twenty years ago. But mainly, it protects the historic city not only
from the greed of developers but from the zeal and hubris of designers. 
For Barcelona has a glut of design.
At two in the morning, on what its habitues call the Via Liturgica, an 
unnamed strip of orange-dirt road behind the University of Barcelona, 
near the football stadium west of the city, the transvestite hookers display 
themselves, waiting for clients while Catalans in cars look at them.
Unless they get into a cat fight, which sometimes happens, their 
dignity is vestal. They do not camp up and down, like models vogueing 
on a runway. They stand widely separated, like idealized statues carved
from the gross and hairy male protein of their former selves, occasionally 
doing a circuit to mark off territory, the older ones stalking and the 
younger ones teetering slightly in their high heels on the rutted sur-
face. This one looks like Carmen Miranda, that like the young Anita 
Ekberg, a third like Veruschka, and a fourth, with an Egyptian wedge 
of frizzy hair, resembles Sonia Braga. But for a cache-sexe and some 
accessories-a feather boa, a leather bustier, or mesh stockings-they 
are naked, some with magnificent breasts that possess the artificial per-
fection of hothouse fruit, achieved like the grace of Saint Theresa through 
patient devotional mortification and self-denial: hormones, surgery, and 
much saving up to pay the doctors. Sometimes one of them will snarl 
at a carload of useless gawking teenagers, all testosterone and zits but 
no pesetas, and spit. Most of the time they exhibit a regal indifference, 
a self-absorption within the strutting temple of the redesigned body that 
goes far beyond the ordinary narcissism of mannequins. "Son arquitectes," 
says my friend Corbero.
The cars drive slowly by, jouncing on the ruts; turn; cruise back. 
There are battered little Renaults and big Mercedes. Their wheels raise 
a yellow fog of dust that hangs in the air. The headlights burn through
it, casting inky elongated shadows from the human statues. Very rarely 
a vehicle will stop, and one of the apparitions, after a minute's palaver, 
will get in. But most cars keep circulating. Their drivers are there to ', 
look, not buy. This is street theater of a curiously pure kind, a tableau 
vivant in which the audience moves but the actors do not. But it seems 
to go back beyond theater into ritual: in their fantastic incongruity, ', 
remade by pills and scalpels, shaved, wigged, depilated, creamed, 
rouged, kitted out like Marlene Dietrich, and then spotlighted on this 
stage of dirt and ratty concrete, the travestits of the Via Liturgica are 
like fantasies out of a pagan past as imagined by Beardsley illustrating
the Satyricon of Petronius, haughty Messalinas, pre-Christian as well as 
postmodern.
They are also an extreme metaphor of their city's present obsession. 
They are on the cutting edge, so to speak, of Catalan design. In their 
sacrificial devotion to it, they are the real thing, representing the ser 
autentic of Barcelona's struggles to remake itself. If London has the chang-
ing of the guard as one of its emblems for mass tourism, Barcelona has 
the changing of the body. This has required a number of prolonged and 
sometimes painful operations, accompanied by an obstinate defiance of 
norms and a certain amount of rebuke from the conservative minded. 
The depth of the change is accompanied by a great deal of bitching, 
competition, and stylistic froufrou. In what other city could you find a 
bilingual guidebook rating bars, discos, and restaurants not by the quality 
of their food or service but entirely by their design ambience? Thus for 
a place called Network, on the Diagonal, the English text reads: "It's 
hard not to feel like Harrison Ford in Blade Runner in this disquieting 
setting, permeated by an aesthetic sornewhere between `destroy' and 
high-tech. However, the yuppies and would-bes eating by the light of 
the TV monitors bring you back to reality. . . . The unisex toilets are 
worth a look." Can't wait. Or try Flash-Flash, another restaurant: "In 
the purest 6os-meets-70s style ... now a classic and an obligatory point 
of reference. An interesting democratic phenomenon takes place in this 
black-and-white setting in which voyeurism and exhibitionism play an 
important part . . . we suggest the hamburgers." One imagines flocks 
of design-crazed Japanese and Californians moving from one such place 
to the next like avid insects, picking up the ethereal pollen of interior-
decoration ideas on their sticky palps, and staying thin. Those who want 
serious food can eat in their accustomed staid holes.
Barcelona moves into the 199os obsessed with design. Designers are 
to it what young cigar-chomping art stars were to New York in the 
198os. Design consciousness pervades the city, in an irritated ecstasy of
angular, spiky, spotted, jerry-built, post-Memphis, sub-Miroesque man-
nerism. Designer ashtrays, designer pencils, designer kitchen gear, de-
signer food, and even designer chocolate in the form of Ionic capitals 
and miniature mastabas filled with liqueur: it's franchise heaven for 
Name Anyone. Even the children appear to have been designed-flocks 
of tots, garbed like medieval jesters in Day-Glo sneakers and parti-
colored blouson jackets, with panels of saffron yellow, black, lime green, 
puce, orange, magenta. They look like models from a Benetton ad, 
especially when you see thirty of them sitting under the awning of a
bank in Passeig de Gracia, solemnly drawing Gaudi's Casa Batllo with 
crayons. They, too, will grow up to be designers, as their remote ances-
tors were encouraged to be Catalan secessionists. The men you see in 
Los Angeles restaurants and assume to be film producers or, at least, 
postulant scriptwriters-Armani shoulders and brilliantined hair, 
combed straight back and secured in a small ponytail with a rubber band; 
that is, half the clientele-may be assumed, in Barcelona, to be designers. 
And of what? Of a hotel that will not be open for the Olympics; of a 
wire-mesh ashtray; of some PoMo whatnot with a stepped Dutch top 
and black balls on its legs.
In truth, Barcelona has long had excellent designers: the upper-
middle-class Catalan taste for luxury, solidity, and fantasy in the fin de 
siecle reached a climax in the work of men like Joan Busquets i Jane and
Gaspar Homar 1 NIezquida, whose marquetry furniture attained a level 
of refinement comparable to anything made in Paris or Vienna. But this 
tradition died with modernisme itself; there were no outstanding Catalan 
designers of furniture and domestic objects in the Art Deco idiom, and 
no industrial base existed for the manufacture of "rationalist" material. 
Toward the end of Franquism, pioneering Barcelona designers in the 
196os such as Andre Ricard and Miguel Mila set up an axis of com-
munication with Milan, studying the careful and rational "classics" of 
Italian designers like Magistretti, Scarpa, and Gardella. Italian proto-
types continue to set the sense of quality for much serious Catalan design, 
including the work of Oscar Tusquets and Pep Bonet for Studio PER, 
and the brilliant industrial designer Ramon Benedito, who, with Lluis 
Morillas and Josep Puig, formed an experimental group in Barcelona 
called Transatlantic. But in the 198os Barcelona was also flooded with 
a peculiarly nitwitted and lighthearted mode of design, growing from a 
juncture among disco, comics, fashion, PoMo theory (or what passed 
for it), and Memphis mannerisms. This is the stuff with franchising clout 
and media appeal, and it ramps over the city like kudzu.
Its reductio ad absurdum, or locus classicus if you prefer, is a dis-
cotheque called the Torre d'Avila, built into the entrance rampart of the 
Poble Espanyol on Montjuic, the ever-popular fake village of buildings
done in all the traditional architectural styles of Spain that was erected 
for the 1929 World's Fair. Elsewhere in Spain, real old buildings are 
converted into restaurants, discos, or art galleries. The Torre d'Avila is 
unique in being a fake old building, a medieval simulacrum, which some 
sixty years after its construction has been filled with an orgy of equally 
simulated postmodernism. The conversion is said to have cost its Catalan 
entrepreneurs half a billion pesetas, or five million dollars at the current
rate of exchange, and nobody can deny that they got some bang for their 
buck. The Torre d'Avila has some claim, not to put too fine a point on 
it, to be considered the most seriously unenjoyable boite de nuit in Spain, 
or maybe the world. This is not so much due to the price of its drinks 
(fourteen hundred pesetas, about fourteen dollars) or to its clientele 
(mostly the young Catalan equivalents of what, in New York, is dis-
missively called the BTC, or Bridge and Tunnel crowd-out-of-towners 
come in to look) as to its design or, rather, designiness. Its authors are 
Alfredo Arribas and Javier Mariscal, a comic-strip artist who lives in 
Barcelona and has become the official limner of the Olympic Games, 
creating its mascot, Cobi, a ubiquitous dog derived from George Her-
riman's immortal figure of Krazy Kat. (Cobi has a partner, Nosi, pre-
sumably a bitch. She has no arms and is the symbol of the Paralympics, 
the athletic competitions for the handicapped.) He is also the creator of 
a twenty-foot-long fiberglass prawn that was installed on top of Gam-
brinus, a snack bar on the newly renovated Moll de la Fusta, Barcelona's 
harbor esplanade, in the late 198os. Mariscal comes from Valencia, a 
part of Spain noted for its fallas: straw-and-papier-mache effigies used 
on feast days and then burned. Unfortunately this falla is incombustible, 
and much to the Ajuntament's taste.
Whether the Torre d'Avila will last is hard to predict. Its sheer 
awfulness may entitle it to preservation. Mariscal and Arribas set out to 
make your big night on the town an uninterrupted barrage of the cliches
of PoMo irony-as though Philippe Starck at his most morbid teamed 
up with Peter Eisenman at his most hostile to do the sets for Pee-wee's 
Playhouse.
The Torre d'Avila is built on several levels, all linked by hanging 
steel staircases and a glass capsule elevator whose riders are spotlighted 
to make them feel like stars. The club's floors have holes in them, enabling
those above to look down on those below, while those below gaze up 
the skirts of those above. The main lounge has a canopy that goes up 
and down on wires, and sharp spotlights that pick out mock-antique 
masks on the semicircular walls. The tables are tiny, the chairs peni-
tential. More tables stick out of the curved wall, at which you may also 
sit; but below each of them hangs, on a wire, a small metal sputnik with 
more wires protruding from it, whose sole aim seems to be to snag and 
ladder the stockings of unwary women. On the floor below there is a 
circular billiard table, next to which is the gents' lavatory, a transparent 
glass enclosure. The urinal is top lighted by UV bulbs, which turn your 
piss a lurid green. If you turn around to zip your fly, you find yourself 
facing the billiard players through the glass. It is hard to be sure whether
this frankness about bodily functions is designed to force the clientele 
to scorn false modesty, or to discourage it from cruising and snorting 
coke in the john.
Barcelona is a metropolis; it has long been an intensely provincial 
place as well. The obtrusive sense of Catalan specialness gives rise to 
nagging doubts about the value of new cultural endeavors (does this beat
Madrid at its own game?) and to a defensive overrating of the vitality 
of local culture (who cares about Madrid anyway?). This syndrome is 
perfectly familiar to anyone who, like me, grew up in Australia. It leads 
to a mildly compulsive exaggeration of the merits of, among other things, 
local design. Not to believe completely in the regional culture hero is, 
in some degree, to let the side down. A striking example is the reputation 
of the architect Ricardo Bofill, whose name is so closely identified with 
the post-Franco resurgence in Barcelona. His most recent building is a 
mock-classical affair in the Olympic Ring on Montjuic, the National 
Institute of Physical Education. "Ricardo Bofill," one of the Ajunta-
ment's brochures announces with a flourish, "has built practically noth-
ing in Barcelona, the city where he was born. The Olympic Games have 
ensured that this anomalous situation should change."
Actually, Bofill does have a building history in Barcelona. But it is 
awkward, and one does not dwell on it. The "practically nothing" he 
built was one of the most discussed buildings of modern Spain.
Ricardo Bofill emerged in the late 196os with large social theories. 
He was the right man for the Divine Left, with notions of collectivity 
overlaid by the authoritative pose of the Formgiver who knows what
the People need. His first large building, a cobalt-blue array of modular 
flats on a hill above Sitges, looking like one of the blocks of niches in a 
cemetery, went up in 1966, and by 1969 it was officially a ruin, con-
demned as structurally too dangerous to live in. But Sitges is a fair 
distance down the coast from Barcelona, and Bofill was soon immersed 
in a larger housing project, this time for workers, in the industrial suburb 
of Sant Just Desvern, a little way toward the airport past Esplugues de 
Llobregat. He named it Walden Seven, after the Utopia of social con-
ditioning proposed by the American behavioral psychologist B. F. Skin-
ner. It is a landmark: a hulking castlelike structure with half-cylinder 
balconies, all sheathed in terra-cotta tiles. When it opened in 1975, it 
was widely hailed as an emblem of Barcelona's renewal after Franco and 
Porcioles-look what the left can do for people oppressed by the mo-
notony of the industrial polygons!
But the families who had to live in it loathed Walden Seven. It was 
poky; it leaked; its elevators and plumbing and electricity kept failing.
Naturally, neither its defects nor the discontent of its inhabitants showed 
up in the many photographs of Walden Seven that appeared in archi-
tectural magazines. Nor did they perturb the autocratic serenity of Bofill, 
who in 1978 declared in his own text Architecture and Man (published, 
perhaps wisely, in French and in Paris) that those lucky enough to dwell 
in Walden Seven were
thrilled to take part in an original experience, because they feel different 
from others, because they now live in a place so extraordinary that they 
can feel proud of it. . . . The confrontation over Walden Seven is 
serious, because its inhabitants have only now become aware that they 
are, in a sense, the pioneers of an experience . . . they know that 
they can protest, object, shout, but that they can change nothing. They 
only have one choice: stay or go. They wanted to change the building 
to make it conventional. But they failed: the presence of the place, the 
spatial organization are too strong.
Take that, housewives! Perhaps the "original experience" was not 
so original; Spanish workers had been living in ill-heated buildings with 
defective elevators and fuses that kept blowing for quite some time before
Walden Seven. But then a further hitch developed. It began to fall apart. 
The terra-cotta cladding on its external walls started peeling off, though 
if there is one thing Catalans traditionally know how to do, it is how to 
keep tiles on a wall. Now the whole perimeter of the building had to 
be strung with nets so that Bofill's falling tiles did not brain its inhab-
itants. Ten years later, the nets are still there, falling to pieces themselves. 
The fallen tiles are removed from time to time, which is just as well, 
since their accumulated weight would have collapsed the net scaffolding 
long ago. Today every side of the hulk, ground to roof, shows huge 
patches of raw mortar where hundreds of square feet of terra-cotta have 
come off. Restoring it is out of the question, but this seems not to worry 
the town hall of Sant Just Desvern, which has it on its list of local 
buildings of architectural interest. Bofill's offices remain in a converted 
cement factory right next to it.
This juxtaposition-as though a doctor had his surgery next to his 
patients' graveyard-seems to have troubled no one except the tenants 
of Walden Seven. Bofill was Catalan and therefore deserved patronage,
even though another of his housing developments-the so-called Barri 
Gaudi in Reus-also became uninhabitable within a decade of comple-
tion. Meanwhile, in the 198os, his work appealed to French officials, 
who gave him enormous projects to do outside Paris and in Montpellier.
These he carried out in a coarsely scenographic style, a parody of neo-
classicism. (Autres temps, autres moeurs: bye-bye Skinner, hi Ledoux!) Few 
of his clients, in France or the United States, seem to have checked out 
his built buildings: that was not the way with postmodernism. One 
looked at photos in design magazines, not real buildings, just as collectors 
in the 198os bought art from slides. Bofill's reputation in Barcelona came 
from being "international," while in New York it came from being 
Catalan. Thus it happened that Bofill was hired by Madrid to do the 
gateway to Barcelona for the Olympic year: a new main terminal for the 
airport of Barcelona at El Prat de Llobregat. It is a high, handsome steel-
and-glass cube, floored with red marble, with palm trees growing inside 
it: a stylish job. But the marble is cracking into potholes and the palms 
are dying for lack of air, and it seems that neither Bofill nor his design-
fuddled clients looked into the effect that such large planes of glass might 
have on radar signals received by the adjacent control tower. They 
generate so much radar interference that the flight traffic-control screens 
are plagued with ghost blips, which often cannot be distinguished from 
incoming or outgoing aircraft. One hopes a cure will be found, but in 
the meantime-as La Vanguardia sighed in the article that broke the 
unwelcome story in June 1991-"the terminal ... has not escaped from 
a mass of unforeseen defects that may end by turning it into a permanent 
example of a national fiasco."
Such are the perils of the culture hero. Faced with the present design 
mania, even the foreigner may find himself mildly yearning for an older 
Catalunya-for the pitted moon-white wall of Miro's farmhouse, as it 
were, rather than the smirking reflexiveness of Catalan PoMo; for the 
solid culinary ground of Catalan "brown food"-the butifarra amb mon-
guetes and the rossejat de fideus, the sweet-salty taste of the gunk in the 
head of a perfectly fresh grilled gamba or the weird, ancient, dark taste 
of a mar i muntanya, stew involving squid, lobster, rabbit, meatballs, 
and chocolate-rather than the latest frippery of Catalo-Californian cui-
sine. Is this the nostalgia of a middle-aged tourist? Perhaps, but one may 
stick with it anyway. The city, one is constantly told, is "in transition." 
So it is. Like all other great cities, it always has been. But without a 
sense of its traditions and its history, how can anyone know what "tran-
sition" means? Barcelona has a tradition of intense, wrenching civic 
change, of long-shot gambles and risky endeavors that consort oddly 
with its self-image of bourgeois seny. Such proclivities were not invented 
when the dictator died; they go far back, and to see them one should 
begin at the beginning.