TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061190/0611270.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.6 KB | 143 lines

                                                                                TRAVEL, Page 86

The Most Dynamic City in Europe?


Spurred by the 1992 Olympics, Barcelona claims the title with
an exuberant revival

By MARGOT HORNBLOWER/BARCELONA


    A Joan Miro sculpture towers over Barcelona's Parc de
l'Escorxador, its riotous colors glinting in the sun. Around
it, grandmothers in sneakers, stocky shopkeepers and children
in starched frocks join hands. A brass band brays for a
slow-motion minuet. Toes out! Toes in! Deliberately, then
merrily, 500 people count steps. The sardanas are courtly
affairs, far removed from the stomping passion of Spanish
flamenco. Under the Franco dictatorship, the dances were banned
as subversive evidence of Catalan nationalism. But now, on
Sunday afternoons, they are as ubiquitous as barbershop
quartets at Iowa county fairs. "They're a sign of our
identity," says Joan Anglada, a furniture salesman, pausing for
breath.

    A tourist set loose in born-again Barcelona bumps into such
euphoric boosterism around every corner. "Catalonia is a
nation!" exults Jordi Pujol, president of the autonomous region
of 6 million people. "We have our own language, our own
history, our own culture." To show it off, the city of 1.7
million has seized upon the 1992 Summer Olympics, with its
windfall of government money and free publicity, and has
catapulted itself into the ranks of Europe's favored capitals.
"You go to Milan, Paris or Hamburg, and people marvel that
Barcelona has become the most dynamic city in Europe," says
Jose Maria Marti Ruffo, a London-based Catalan businessman.

    Along the waterfront, where Christopher Columbus' statue
points triumphantly out to sea, rusty railroad tracks were torn
up to make way for two miles of sandy swimming beaches and
palm-shaded cafes. About $2 billion worth of stadiums, hotels,
restaurants and museums have been built or are under
construction, a showcase for internationally known architects
such as Richard Meier, Arata Isozaki and Jose Rafael Moneo.
"It's an orgy of creativity," says Mayor Pasqual Maragall,
grandson of Catalonia's most famous poet. A former lecturer in
urban planning at Johns Hopkins University, Maragall invited
such American artists as Claes Oldenburg and Ellsworth Kelly
to make sculptures for a new park system that has become an
international model of city planning.

    Aesthetes may complain that Barcelona lacks the glittering
royal art galleries and grandiose vistas of London, Madrid or
Paris and that its geography, a natural amphitheater framed by
mountains and sea, produces a smog worthy of Los Angeles. Some
may even view as excessive chauvinism the natives' insistence
on speaking Catalan rather than Spanish. But those who take the
time will discover in this most Mediterranean of cities a rare
personality, fanatically avant-garde yet obsessively
preservationist. First century Roman baths are being excavated
amid the twisting streets of its dense Gothic quarter. The
famous Picasso Museum is housed in a 15th century palace; the
main Olympic stadium is a renovated 1929 arena. This month
Antoni Tapies, Catalonia's best-known living painter, will
open, in a refurbished art deco mansion, a foundation featuring
four decades of abstract works. "Catalonia," says Tapies, "can
be summed up in an old motto, seny i rauxa -- prudence and
daring."

    The daring part crops up in the kitschy surrealism of
Salvador Dali; in the sensuous modernismo architecture of
Catalonia's turn-of-the-century masters, Antonio Gaudi and
Lluis Domenech i Montaner; and in the explosion of contemporary
design that has transformed the city's nightclubs and even
furniture stores into tourist attractions. If Madrid was ever
a city of soldiers and aristocrats, Barcelona is a metropolis
of merchants and artisans. Its fame springs from monuments like
Gaudi's Templo de la Sagrada Familia (Sacred Family Cathedral),
with its stone-dripped spires and wildly ornamented facades.
But it is less a city where one tramps from one guidebook
attraction to another than a place that unfolds like a treasure
hunt, revealing itself in small clues: rococo streetlights and
curlicued ironwork balconies; a stained-glass peacock, an art
nouveau marvel, nestled above the door of Escriba, a celestial
chocolate shop; a Gaudi-designed sidewalk of blue-green
pavement stones carved with sea creatures.

    The discovered delights are more than visual. In the
Boqueria, an open-air marketplace, five varieties of wild
mushrooms are fried up for less than $5 at a simple lunch
counter. The funicular to Tibidabo, Catalonia's answer to Coney
Island, presents a panoramic view of the turquoise sea. Take
in a concert at the flamboyant 1908 Palace of Music, with its
lush mosaics and Wagnerian Valkyries. Pick up a souvenir at a
street table staffed by separatist activists: a sticker of
Snoopy hoisting the Catalan flag. (Wear it to the annual El
Barca-Real Madrid soccer match -- and be prepared for a
fistfight.)

    In the summer, a visit to Barcelona can be steamy and is
best punctuated with side trips to the ancient villages of the
Pyrenees, with their Romanesque churches. In the fall, the city
is at its cultural high season, with the Festival del Tardor,
an international theater, dance and music extravaganza. Spain's
best opera house, the gilded Liceo in Barcelona, features fine
international singers, including homegrown stars Jose Carreras
and Montserrat Caballe. No matter what the season, the traveler
can feast at one of the fish restaurants of working-class
Barcelona, its neon signs flashing and its laundry rippling from
the balconies. Sadly, a new coastal-protection law threatens
to shut down the parasoled beach tables, where you can enjoy
paella while a barefoot, sad-eyed Gypsy girl plays a miniature
accordion.

    Barcelonans inevitably end their evenings with a stroll up
the Ramblas, the ebullient boulevard where all classes, ages
and ideologies flow in a restless human torrent. This populist
Champs Elysees, a Felliniesque vision, is lined with stalls
selling flowers, parrots, canaries and turtles; newspaper
kiosks with journals in eight languages; cafes dishing up
snacks of fried squid and hard sausage; Gypsy fortune tellers,
their tarot cards laid out on fold-up tables. On one street
corner, Eduardo Mazo, an Argentine poet, has pasted his verse
on billboards for more than a decade. "The Ramblas is the most
magic mile in Europe," he says. "People begin at one end when
they're tired of life. By the time they get to the other end,
they're in love with life." And with Barcelona.