BARCELONA: MORNING AND EVENING

A Portrait of Catalonian Identity

September 24th 2019

AM:

Barcelona is waking up.

Just before dawn, the street cleaners and delivery trucks start their rounds. As the night slowly lifts, dogs bark and radios burst into life. Music streams from open windows and construction workers start their machinery. Baristas get the coffee on, shopkeepers pull up shutters, traffic builds. Children call to each other across the street on their way to school. Women wash the steps to their apartments, emptying buckets of dirty water over the pavements. From the palm trees in the parks and the plazas comes the incessant twittering of hundreds of parakeets, and across the city, church bells ring for morning mass. This is the soundscape of the Catalonian capital.

Barcelona is one of Europe’s most densely populated places with nearly two million people living in less than 40 square miles. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Worldwide Hearing Index ranks Barcelona as the 7th noisiest city in the world. Heading out of the apartment in search of coffee, I step into the relentless noise of the day.

We are staying in the area of the city known as the Eixample. Flying in low to Barcelona from the Balearic, you get a bird’s eye view of the streets below, organised in a neat grid system. The Eixample was designed in the nineteenth century by architect Ildefons Cerdà. In the 1850s, the old town walls were pulled down to allow the overcrowded city to expand. Cerdà’s new Eixample connected the outlying satellite towns in a layout designed to maximise efficient and sanitary living and to encourage a sense of community. On the ground, the wide avenues lined with bars, cafés and shops, hum with life.

Cerdà’s revolutionary urban design with its emphasis on public spaces was inspired by a populist ideology. He created a neighbourhood without class divisions, where the population was equally distributed without exclusive enclaves for the rich or the poor. It is an example of what the Catalonians call seny, a national characteristic meaning common sense or a pragmatic attitude.

But there are two sides to the Catalonian temperament. The flip-side of seny is rauxa, a kind of madness or an impulsive burst of activity. Catalonians like to feel that they mostly exhibit the former, but from time to time they allow themselves to let off steam with wild abandon.

Barcelona’s architecture displays plenty of rauxa. The Eixample is liberally sprinkled with extraordinary buildings by Modernist architects like Antoni Gaudi. In the morning sunshine, we pass the Parc and the Palau Güell, highly ornate surreal creations in his idiosyncratic anarchic style.

But nothing prepares you for the sight of the Sagrada Familia - the Basilica of the Holy Family - a colossal structure soaring 560 feet into the sky. It defies description, managing to be all at once substantial and delicate, uncompromising and whimsical, hideous and sublimely beautiful.

When the cathedral is finally finished in 2021, it will have been 140 years in its creation. Gaudi meant it to be a monument to the glory of God and was fond of saying, “My client is not in a hurry.” God might have been happy to wait, but the pragmatic authorities were not. The Sagrada was consecrated by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010. Visitors flock in vast numbers every year to marvel at the incomplete construction, usefully providing a constant source of income to enable its continuation.

The arranged marriage of mass tourism and profound faith is practical but not entirely comfortable. Joining the heaving throng, we enter the nave and for a moment I am unable to step forward, stilled by the soaring brilliance of colour, light, space. A sudden transcendental sense of something unearthly, ineffable, overwhelms me. It is simply breathtaking.

“Move along!” snaps the guide and waves me forward.

The cathedral has become a symbol of the city, firmly rooted in the earth but reaching ever- upwards to the heavens, ever-onwards to something bigger, better, brighter. It exemplifies all the contradictions that characterise Catalonia’s national identity.

The key to their split personality - el seny i la rauxa - probably lies in the region’s long troubled history. Centuries of striving for recognition have created a strong sense of togetherness, an understanding that only by working prudently together, by reining in their individual impulsivity, can Catalonians hold fast to their identity.

In the nineteenth century, when Cerdà was building the Eixample, there was a resurgence of interest in Catalonian identity but it wasn’t until 1931 that the region was recognised as politically distinct. Self-governance was granted to the Catalans by the Second Spanish Republic along with the official use of the Catalan language. After the Republic was defeated in the Civil War, Franco took his revenge on its supporters. Catalonia suffered harsh reprisals and its autonomy was revoked, nationalism repressed, and the use of the Catalan language was once again restricted.

Following Franco’s death in 1975, a more democratic Spain emerged and Catalonia now has its own parliament and executive with extensive autonomy. However, for most Catalan people, this is simply not enough.

PM:

I am standing on the balcony of our apartment, enjoying a cigarette before we head out to dinner. The wide street offers a clear view to the blocks of flats opposite. It is nine o’clock in the evening, but there is still a vibrant energy to this part of the city.

And then I hear a solitary clanging, tinny, insistent. I wonder if it is a pelican crossing but I can’t locate it. It sounds for all the world like somebody is hitting a saucepan with a wooden spoon. And then another, joining it. And then another. And another. Slowly, the clanging expands to fill the deep space between apartments, to fill the wide street, the warm evening, with noise.

I realise that it is emanating from dark balconies and unlit windows all around me, on both sides of the road. The people are not visible, anonymous in the night. Passing cars honk their horns, joining the cacophony. The clanging swells, reaches a crescendo; a wave of intense, immense sound that reverberates up and down the street. For ten minutes or more, the clamour fills the air and I am bathed in a roaring, deafening din.

And then it starts to tail off. One by one, the saucepans cease their clanking refrain. The usual sounds of the evening resume, people chattering and laughing, music playing, dogs barking. For a few moments, the sound is still audible in the distance, the faintest echo from other neighbourhoods, but that too fades and the city returns to itself as if nothing has happened.

We go out and eat grilled peppers and salted cod. I ask the waiter about what we heard. “They were doing the pots,” he shrugs. “Like every night.”

The saucepan protest or cassolada is another demonstration of el seny i la rauxa. Although not endemic to the region, the Catalonians have got it down to a fine art. Highly organised thanks to social media, people know exactly when to start clanging and when to stop, sensibly just in time for supper. It is the most egalitarian form of protest. Anyone of any age and background can join in without even having to leave their home.

Some reports suggest that the cassolada in Barcelona has been happening every night since 2010, when the Constitutional Court of Spain declared some articles of the Statute of Autonomy to be unconstitutional. The Catalan government regularly surveys their population’s "sentiment of belonging". In July last year, 46.7% voted for independence from Spain.

The Catalonians are not giving up.

October 18th 2019

POSTSCRIPT:

Over half a million people, angered by the imprisonment of Catalan separatist leaders, have taken to the streets of Barcelona, bringing it to a standstill. Violence has escalated, with demonstrators building blockades, setting fires and throwing missiles, while the police retaliate with rubber bullets, water cannon and tear gas. For a week, the city has been in turmoil. Today, the Spanish government called in the Guardia Civil.

Last month, I was walking those same streets taking in the sights of the Catalan capital. Apart from one or two Estelades - the Catalonian flag - draped over balconies and the cassolada, there was little visible sign of what was about to erupt.

Cerdà’s wide avenues, designed to provide an environment conducive to good health and a sense of community, are ironically the perfect layout for the protestors’ running battle with the police. They can congregate in large numbers, organise themselves to span the streets, build robust barricades. The Sagrada Familia has closed its doors. The Eixample has become one big violent playground. They’ve put the saucepans down.

Barcelona is burning.