Los Prat lands at El Prat
BARCELONA
I was waiting in line to clear immigration when I noticed that the signs on the floor telling me to "stand behind the line" were written in three languages: Catalan, Spanish and English. The dormant linguist in me noticed that the orthography of those few Catalan words were strikingly similar to French. With time to spare in queue - I landed at 7am and understandably only two counters were open - I descended the Quora rabbit hole to learn that indeed they do share some distant relation within the family of Occitano-Romance languages. But as a first time visitor, I didn't yet realise how this merely historical perspective belied the struggle that Barcelona, or Catalunya in general, in the modern day was faced with: the enmeshing of three identities that couldn't be more distinct from one another.
The immigration officer mistook me for a resident at first, launching into a series of questions that I could only imagine was about having the necessary visa to enter. When he finally realised that I didn't understand a word he was saying then, he saw me for who I actually was to the city: a necessary evil needed to bring the city's tourist arrival numbers back to what it was pre-Covid. I was happy to oblige. I had no intention to visit Barcelona this year. My plans were born out of my parents' desire to minimise the number of days my sister would be traveling alone prior to commencing summer school. At the same time, I suppose my sister herself was happy to have someone cover the expenses, albeit at the cost of some of her freedom.
After I made it out of the arrival hall, and not before I nearly lost a significant amount of cash to a deceptive forex provider, I was faced with a choice. Could my sleep-deprived body bear a public transport crush that includes a few transfers, or should I use some of the disposable income that I had spent sixteen years of my life working towards on a taxi that would get me to my hotel peacefully? Convincing myself that there's no point to money if I wasn't going to spend it, I made my way to the taxi queue and was soon on my way to my hotel in Poblenou.
It would become apparent that the cost of that one journey could have paid for an entire meal in Barcelona. Money that could have been better spent undoubtedly but at the same time I couldn't help but be shocked: surely that can't be how much the locals spend on food on a daily basis?
As the taxi sped down the B-10, a sight emblematic of a transition the city has made since the late 90s begins to come into focus: the age-old cargo ports backgrounded by the looming presence of cruise ships and their tentacle-like gangways. A slow shift that was made definitive by being put on the world stage during the 1992 Olympics, the Barcelona economy embarked has been moving away from industry and its world of permanent goods ever since, towards one that is service-oriented and where the people that make it up are more ephemeral. Fittingly, Montjuic, which held many Olympic events, looks over this sight. It's a transition that my own own coastal city made around the same time, one that similarly invites questions on what was gained and lost by way of economic necessity.
I have no doubt that Barcelones take a lot of pride in their city, and rightly so. To see tourists come in droves - some for art and architecture, others for the sand and water, and others still for the jam-packed concert and MICE calendar - is validation of the city's many different attractions. But as I strolled through the city's highly walkable streets, I could understand why its inhabitants would want "tourists [to] go home": it has been built for the people living in it, not the ones passing through.
Indeed, it's a curious observation that some of Barcelona's most famous architectural marvels are in fact just homes, like Casa Battlo or Casa Mila with their sinuous lines and trencardis mosaics. Even if you look beyond Gaudi, you'll find other quotidian spaces such as the modernist Hospital Sant Pau designed by LluĂs Domènech i Montaner which stands tall as a stunning physical embodiment of the belief that health can be distilled from beauty and thoughtful design.
It sounds trite to say that a city is built for its people but that it should be a given is a rather bold assumption. I'm not suggesting that its a binary either, that a city can only be designed for either locals or travellers. However, the end result can be dramatically different when a city is designed with both groups in mind. Only newer metropolises like Singapore or Doha have the luxury of being designed from a starting point that accounts for mass tourism and how that can be tapped on for economic growth and source of employment. Older cities have histories that are an innate draw for any traveller but their administrations also have the unenviable task of figuring out how to make tourist attractiveness and resident liveability co-exist, with limited latitude in terms of urban design and infrastructure.
Unfortunately, outcomes like retaining a city's liveability come in second to the money just waiting to be claimed by opening up the city to foreign dollars. What follows is that while I'm dazzled by the splendour of colour in the cavernous nave of the La Sagrada Familia, a couple marking the occasion of their marriage are relegated to the smaller chapel beneath the transept.
Eventually, the city as it actually is revealed itself, even if it were only in brief moments.
As the locals are being squeezed out of their city and further into the suburbs of the province by Airbnb proliferation, gentrification, and REIT land grabs, the boundaries of Barcelona start to blur. But even further out, an hour and a half away from the city center, lies Montserrat, a mountain range of serenity far away from the economic and touristic bustle of the city. And nestled in it is the Santa Maria de Montserrat, a Benedictine abbey. We visited Montserrat on our last full day in Barcelona, a pseudo-retreat inward, literally and metaphorically, away from the heady physical pleasures of the city.
I can scarcely begin to imagine what went through the minds of the seventy or so monks that renounced worldly life to live in the abbey today. I don't think I could ever bring myself to willingly embrace an ascetic life, no matter how eager I am to outgrow the attachments and pleasures of human life. Again, the chasm between intention and reality begins to show. But as I prayed at the sanctuary of the Virgin of Montserrat, I felt a buzz of energy that I knew wasn't of this world. Some may say its imagined - a placebo, if you will - but I would not be surprised if that same buzz was what convinced them to take the leap of faith.
Far up on the mountains, everything feels small. Barcelona was a speck on the horizon. There was no sense of time save for the shadows cast by the sun in the sky. No streets for cars to be ambling down, no cranes towering over precise blocks built to precise specifications, no throngs of people checking their watches as they shuffled through the metro station. There were only people like ants crawling their way up and down the slopes of the mountain. When the monks first made their trek to Montserrat in the 11th century, it was likely they were driven by a desire to get physically closer to heaven by being on the highest point in Catalonia. But today, I wonder if most ordinary people make their pilgrimage out of a compulsion to get away from the cacophony of lower ground.
The next day, my sister is finally free of my parents' proxy grasp and sets off for Amsterdam. I make a few final jokes about her now having to pay her own way and how she owes me a few thousand for all the trips we've taken together. A decade ago I couldn't imagine travelling with her even as a family, let alone just the two of us. But I'm thankful for the way time brings with it maturity, just as it did for me.
The prat found in Josep Tarradellas Barcelona–El Prat Airport and many other road signs means meadow but modern Barcelona is certainly not a meadow anymore. A sprawling city with something to offer to almost every visitor, its residents now demand that it remember to offer something to the city's own. And they will tell you that they aren't demanding much, just something as simple as a small plot of unused land to be devoted to neighbourhood facilities.
Slow walking through Barcelona, you realise there's so much more to the city than just the fifteen second highlight reels on TikTok. Yet, no matter how eager I am to dig deeper, if returning means breaking the city for the ones whom it means the most, then that's an exchange I'm not willing to make.
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