Looking at Barcelona with fresh eyes

Barcelona is one of the great cities of the world  - at least, so the Internet claims. More specifically, it is admired for the built environment. Certainly there were crowds outside the Modernista palaces in the centre, like the one above. I’ve been to Barcelona several times, mainly to the centre, Monjuic, and Gracia, but never reflected much about it. Even more disgracefully, I have not yet seen some of the major sites. Of course, I have the books about the city (Robert Hughes, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto) but reading about and actually seeing a city are two different things. Perhaps there is a value in recording first impressions of the city - even though I've been there many times.

So after a day of walking so much that we had blisters, we took the tourist bus and saw the city as a visitor. We went once round the extended city – not the medieval centre (you wouldn’t get a bus around that), but Sagrada Familia, the Hospital of St Pau, and the Monastery of Pedralba, all buildings that I had heard of but not yet seen, for the simple reason that they are some distance out from the city centre. Of course, the bus only goes past these buildings (and doesn't even go past the entrance of the Park Guell or attempt the vertiginous climb to Tibidabo), but a bus tour does give some idea of the layout of the city - and in Barcelona's case, the hills surrounding it. Much of the present-day city is built on serious slopes; the bus was struggling on some of the inclines. The bus also takes you past other landmarks such as the football ground.

Even without reading about the city, any visitor will recognise at least four main zones. First, the medieval centre, with narrow streets barely wide enough to take a small car. This centre is remarkably unchanged; it seems to be built on top of the Roman city, on the basis of the excavations visible in the local museum. 

Next, the much larger-scale, regularly planned, central squares and monument-sized buildings (the Generali Insurance building is typical, imposing from any angle, ostentatious and bloated, but memorable). This is where many of the luxury shops are found and, not by chance, some of the best Modernista buildings. This is the largely 19th- and early 20th-century zone, such as Eixample, a series of rectilinear blocks with little to distinguish individual streets.

Similarly uniform, although built to a much less lavish scale, are the blocks of working-class apartments in Barcaloneta. 

Further out from the centre, there are vast swaithes of post-1945 apartment blocks, with occasional traces alongside of the earlier villas with their own gardens, with the resulting very messy appearance of different styles and heights beside each other. The area of Gràcia, where I was staying, was full of these flats. It looked like the flats were around six storeys in the residential streets, and up to nine storeys along the bigger thoroughfares. For many (most?) inhabitants of Barcelona, this is everyday reality: flats and traffic. Without the palm trees, it could be anywhere. 

What does this very superficial tour reveal? The very dense concentration of buildings, and then the traffic. Barcelona has several large multiple-lane one-way streets in the centre, with mopeds and scooters, cars and buses engaged in what seems an endless race. Crossing the road is not for the faint-hearted and would not be easy outside the pedestrian crossings.

Barcelona is clearly a very crowded city, lacking in green open spaces in the main urban area. There were a few positive initiatives, for example urban gardens from reclaimed housing land (above).

The life of the city is seen at its best in some very animated squares often next to wonderful covered markets, where high-quality food was available. In the markets, wonderful displays of food.

The squares, although lacking green, usually had trees and were surrounded on four sides by high buildings. The people living in the surrounding buildings were clearly tolerating a high level of noise from the busy activity around. In summary, there is a pell-mell feel to much of the city, with rich and poor, lavish and run-down, often jumbled up. Outside the commercial centre, there seems to be a motley collection of small shops, offices and workshops, usually with graffiti on every available wall or door. Someone told me that while commercial property is cheap to rent, the licences for selling food are very expensive, so perhaps many of these small shops are handed down over generations within a family. 

What is distinctive about Barcelona? It gives the impression of being more visibly socially mixed than, say, London, with its clear distinction between the City and the West End, and lack of a medieval centre. A fancy restaurant, a run-down corner shop, and a simple bread shop may appear within a few doors of each other. In some way the medieval crowdedness has extended to the surrounding areas like Gràcia. For me, that small bread shop in the photo sums up Barcelona: a medieval feel persisting in a 20th-century urban layout.