June 2024

Three months in Barcelona

This time I rented an apartment in the Ciutat Vella (Old Town) in Barcelona. It's an area known as El Born, the name for the place where medieval knights would clash in their tournaments. Most of the streets are for pedestrians only, and most of the buildings are very, very old. The one where I live is from the 18th century and my apartment is on the third floor, reached through a narrow and steep staircase.

In the beginning of the 20th century, the poet and painter Jaime Sabartés had his studio in the apartment above mine. At his request, his friend Pablo Picasso painted the walls with figures of a bull, a naked couple, and a hanged man. Unfortunately, when the building was renovated many years later, nobody realized they were looking at art created by Picasso and everything was destroyed.

Two blocks from my building there's the Basílica de Santa María del Mar, from the 14th century. You may be familiar with it if you read the book Cathedral of the Sea, by Ildefonso Falcones, or watched the Netflix series based on the novel, which shows how this gothic church was built.

My apartment in Barcelona, on the third floor of that salmon building, the one with the little balcony with plants. (No, the Vespa is not mine.)

Museums, museums, museums

Barcelona has many museums, and I've visited quite a few of them, of course. The Museu Picasso Barcelona, which is just a couple of blocks away from my apartment, has a collection of over 4,000 works by the artist. It's a great panoramic view of his career, especially the early phases. On the same street, there's the Moco Museum Barcelona, which is some sort of museum for hipsters: the collection includes fashionable contemporary artists like Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Banksy, Marina Abramović, and several others. Barcelona also has a Banksy Museum, which is bigger than the one in Lisbon.

The Fundació Antoni Tàpies had a very cool exhibition when I visited, La Huella del Zen (The Footprint of Zen), showing the influence of Japanese zen monks in the work of Tàpies. The Joan Miró Foundation is a delight for people who, like me, appreciate the abstract surrealism of this crazy Barcelonian. But the best museum in the city, for me, is the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, a large building on top of Montjuic, with a vast collection of romanic, gothic, renaissance, baroque, and modern art. The Museu de l'Art Prohibit, like the name suggests, shows a collection of art that was, at some point, forbidden or taken off an exhibition, for political or moral reasons. The best things I saw there were Los Caprichos by Goya and the Raphael et la Fornarina series by Picasso.

The Museu d'Història de Catalunya shows a good timeline of the region, from the Paleolithic to the post-Franco days. The Museu d'Història de Barcelona (MUHBA) has a large collection of old objects, mostly from Roman and medieval times, but the main attraction are the ruins of the old wall of Barcelona, which we can see from its underground tunnels. The Museo de Arqueologia also has local artifacts but it's very small (especially in comparison with the magnificent archeological museum in Madrid)

I also visited the Museu de la Xocolata (yes, a chocolate museum), the Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona (old photographs), the Museu Egipci de Barcelona (little but interesting collection of artifacts from Egypt), El Born Centre de Cultura i Memòria (a pavilion that once was a public market and now displays the old ruins that were found under it, plus a few temporary exhibitions), the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (where I saw a large exhibition about suburban life in the USA, Suburbia: Building the American Dream), CaixaForum Barcelona (which had a few exhibitions that were not more interesting than the building itself, a former Modernist textile factory), the Museu Frederic Marès (christian sculpture on the first floor, but the second and third floors house the vast collections of the artist, who obsessively gathered all kinds of things, from fans and pipes to clocks and toys), the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (a beautiful building filled with a large collection of garbage pretending to be good art), La Virreina Centre de la Imatge (good photo exhibition by Jeff Wall), Can Framis (which is a very nice museum of contemporary art from Catalunya), Disseny Hub Barcelona (design museum), the Museo Fran Daurel (good collection of contemporary art from Catalunya, hidden inside the uninteresting Poble Espanyol, a tourist trap), the Palau Martorell (for the exhibition Geisha/Samurái, Memorias de Japón), and the Museu Marítim de Barcelona (full of ships, models of ships, paintings of ships, and a full size galley).

Mujer y pájaros al amanecer, by Juan Miró

Royal Galley

Modernist buildings

Barcelona is a good city for people interested in architecture, and the big star around here is the local architect and designer Antoni Gaudí. I've visited some of his works, which are usually crowded with tourists: Casa Batlló, Casa Milá, Casa Vicens, Casa Calvet, Basílica de la Sagrada Família, and Parque Güell.

Everyone talks about Gaudí, but there's another local modernist architect who is equally interesting, Lluís Domènech i Montaner. The Palau de la Musica Catalana is extraordinary. I went there during the day to visit the whole building, and then at night for a flamenco show. The Recinte Modernista de Sant Pau is even better, a large hospital complex of twelve pavilions connected through underground galleries.

Casa Batlló, by Gaudí

Casa Milá, by Gaudí

Palau de la Musica Catalana, by Domènech

Sant Pau, by Domènech

What about the food?

Spain is a great place to eat. In The Lord of the Rings, Pippin famously listed the meals in hobbit culture: breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, and supper. Well, here we have desayuno (breakfast) somewhere between seven and nine in the morning, usually consisting of coffee and pastries; then almuerzo (second breakfast) around ten or eleven (elevenses!), which could be a sandwich, or tortilla de patatas, or just more coffee and pastries; la comida (lunch) is between two and four, with first plate, second plate, and dessert; because you may already be hungry around five or six, there's the merienda (mid-afternoon snack), a good time for churros and hot chocolate; between eight and ten people are all around town eating tapas and drinking wine; finally, between nine and eleven at night you can sit down and have a proper cena (dinner).

Paella is one of my favorite dishes, and I lost count of how many times I had it for lunch. I also had typical Catalonian dishes like escalivada (roasted eggplants, bell peppers, and onions) and arroz negro (rice and squid, all turned black by the squid's ink). And some dishes that are specific to certain places, but I will mention them when I talk about the side trips.

And tapas, of course, mostly croquetas de jamón iberico (ham croquettes), ensaladilla rusa (tuna fish salad, with diced boiled potatoes and lots of olives), and gambas al ajillo (garlic fried shrimp).

I also did something I had not done since Paris in 2018. (Yes, in that pre-pandemic year, while still working full time in Baltimore, I made one trip to France and another to Greece, which was kind of a test run for my current nomad life. I just didn't know that at the time.) On many nights, my dinner was just bread, cheese, and wine. Because those things are very good here. I can get some nice artisanal bread just one block away from my house, and across the street I buy the wine and the cheese. My favorite is Tou del Lluçanès, made of raw cow milk into creamy cheese to be spread on the bread. And I found a reasonably priced batch of L'Equilibrista Garnatxa 2015, robust and fruity at the same time, with some subtle tannins to round it up. Great combination. Also, Barcelona is where pa de vidre (crystal bread) was invented. It's a highly hydrated bread, with a thin crust and a hollow, fine crumb with large, irregular alveoli. Very good to make pa amb tomàquet: bread rubbed over first with garlic, then with tomato, and seasoned with salt and olive oil, in this order.

Paella!

What about side trips?

Since this newsletter is already very long, I will leave the side trips for the second part, to be sent in a couple of days. Mantingueu els ulls ben oberts! (That's "keep your eyes peeled" in Catalan.)