The city of the Catalans – and of Gaudi – is far removed from the cities of the Moors of Al-Andalus.  Islamic rule lasted less than a century here.  Barcelona’s heritage instead moves quickly from the Visigoths to the evocatively named Wilfred the Hairy, the hirsute Catalan warrior whose king’s fingers, smearing Wilfred’s blood on his shield, created the gold and red stripes of the Catalan flag which flies here, as high as the national emblem on civic buildings and proudly and provocatively from residential windows.

 

Proudly because, in spite of losing out on the honour of primacy to Madrid, and of crushing defeat in the War of the Spanish  Succession, and of ruthless oppression and forced homogenisation under Franco, Catalans have nursed the fierce and perhaps slightly embittered, shoulder-bechipped determination of underdogs and the overlooked everywhere.  These days, on every official document, every street sign, every bus stop, Catalan either precedes or replaces Spanish (and just as I was starting to pick up a few words!).  The is a relatively recent phenomenon though, significantly strengthened as the independence movement has gained followers since the economic crash.

 

The provocation of the flags comes from that  movement: almost every flag which flutters from the windows of the Gothic Quarter is inset with a star for Catalan Statehood – set against blue yellow or red to inform the street below what conception of statehood (Rightist, Centrist or Leftist) the flag flyer supports.  The sight of conflicting hues cheek by jowl on the narrow streets of the Old City does convey the prominence of the movement and the strength of feeling; but it also moved me to wild grinning as I replayed in my head John Cleese and the PFJ abjuring the “bloody splitters!” of the Judean People’s Front.

 

To be honest, I have no great love for Barcelona.  The beach is artificial, the old quarter is unextraordinary and the 18th Century  grid-plan extension is pretty and spacious and well-designed, but it feels like any modern European city.  The architecture of the everyday buildings is attractive, mainly 18th and 19th Century, but it all lacks the charm of Paris or Vienna.  I didn’t get as far as the Olympic Park or the magnificently imposing Museum of Catalan art which the bus just drove past, perhaps they would have left me more enamoured of the city.

 

Barcelona is also the City of Gaudi, as any guidebook or souvenir shop will immediately inform you, but I can’t help but be a little wary of a metropolis which can define itself with a single word.  London can’t, New York can’t, and God knows Parisians would set about you with a baguette if you suggested that a single architect defines their city – even if the view begs to differ.  Anyway, for me this “City of Gaudi” business rather begs the questions: “what were you before?”, and “what else have you got?”.  Nonetheless.  I’m not a modernism buff and I didn’t go into the Sagrada Familia (entrance+audioguide an eye-watering E19.50) or the Casa Battla (an unfathomable E21.50), but to be fair they are extraordinarily thought-provoking and striking from the outside.  The Gaudi houses have a whimsy,  a mystical quality to the free flowing shapes and unexpected colours, but even in the straight lines and sharp corners of the towers of the Sagrada Familia – pinched by some Godly hand and stretched and pulled upwards towards the holy seat – there is some modern magic at work.  No, at play.

 

Play was very much the order of the day  in the Sant Jordi hostel I stayed in, resulting in too much time and money spent with other Anglophones, too much rum and God knows too much tequila, and too few pre-noon hours spent sight-seeing.  But I did get a lot of laundry done, and avoided Tuesday’s crashing thunderstorm, and Lexi and Anna and Jackie and Stephanie (hmmm is there a theme here?) were interesting and well-informed company (for Americans).  The walking tour run by  little Zoe-Deschanel-alike Helen from Edinburgh was good if a little light and fluffy- the aural equivalent of filling up on white bread rather than enjoying a well-balanced meal- but the little otherwise unknowable square she took us to, Placa de Sant Felip Neri, was worth the trip on its own.  In this quiet secluded place, mottled sunlight reached down through the leaves of trees which rained a gentle shower of orange flowers on our heads and into the stilled fountain in the centre of the square.  And we saw on the church walls the  pock marks that bear testimony to the Italian bomb which killed over 40 civilians including 20 schoolchildren in 1937, as the laughter from the adjacent primary school reached the edge of our hearing.  Unlike so much of modern, modernist, Barcelona, this was a place of contemplation, of exhalation.

 

I’m leaving Spain now.  I’m sitting on an Easyjet flight to Milan, and I’ve just had my first prego to my first gratsie.  I’m looking forward to Italy.  I’m two weeks into my trip, haven’t lost anything of vital importance, and am not toooo far over a budget which was anyway always rather ambitiously conservative.  But I’m going to miss this country.  Southern Spain was everything I wanted it to be: a land of fearsome heat and the shade of tiny winding alleys, a place of rough red wine and vast stone edifices hewn and accreted and inscribed by peoples of different times, different skins, different gods.  Madrid and Barcelona belong to today’s world, and they suit it well, but the view of the Alhambra from the Mirador de San Nicolas belongs beyond time and outside of it, and now a little part of it belongs to me as well.