World Travel Guide Online

Breathtaking Barcelona
Barcelona, Spain

While Barcelona has always been a world-class city, it didn’t really net its tourism anointment until after it hosted the 1992 Olympics, which predictably blew open the flood gates and it’s been Spain’s number one destination ever since. I’ve been to Barcelona four times and each time I’m left in awe of its offerings and atmosphere. By day there are countless museums, parks, art galleries, and boundless displays of social eccentricities in most public places by an all-star, international cast of weirdos. By night it is eating, drinking and dancing mayhem. Aside from a premeditated shiftless day on the beach, idle and tedious moments are virtually nonexistent in Barcelona; I don’t care how hungover you are. Having already accumulated a savage tan from my tour of southern Spain and Portugal, I chose to bypass the lethargy and copious bare breasts of Barcelona’s beaches on my most recent visit and instead dove into the teeth of the city’s limitless attractions.

One of the highlights of touring Barcelona is the numerous Antoni Gaudí sights. Gaudí was a ground-breaking artist/architect working around the turn of the 20^th century and his designs were so peculiar and exciting that they still draw massive crowds today. Among his contributions are the fairytale-like Güell Park, two wicked looking, coveted apartment buildings on Passeig de Grácia and the mother of them all, the gigantic Temple de la Sagrada Familia (“Temple of the Sacred Family”) that has been under construction since 1882. This thing is so immense and intricate that to date only about 50% of the structure has been completed and no one involved in the project will even take a guess at the completion date (although I found a guide book that claimed that work would be completed by 2035). Hundreds of years ago, taking more than a century to build a cathedral was commonplace. In the 20th/21st centuries, 150 years to build anything is unheard of. This should give you some indication as to the magnitude and detail in Gaudí’s mind boggling designs. While the interior is still more construction site than attraction, both exterior façades are fantastic enough to make you forget yourself, absent-mindedly drop your ice cream cone on your shoe and promptly max-out your digital camera’s memory card. The older Nativity Façade looks as if it were plucked straight out of your worst Gothic, horror nightmare. This side was completed while Gaudí was still kicking and now after nearly 80 years of absorbing Barcelona’s air pollution and grime, it’s in dire need of a good cleaning, which just adds to its decidedly unchurch-like, frightening appearance. The Passion Façade – I never learned if one side is considered “the front” and if so which side that would be; I certainly couldn’t tell – started in the 1950s, is a medley of scenes done in a very striking, intricate, block-like sculpture style that will leave you staring for a good thirty minutes just to get a sense of it all.

Part of the reason that construction has been so gradual is that in many respects they are sticking to the painstaking, traditional methods of masonry and stone work. Also there have been a few delays. There was a 25 year break in work after Gaudí’s death while people debated whether to leave the cathedral unfinished in a tribute to the man or to push on and complete it as he presumably intended. Then, there was an incident during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s that resulted in a small portion of the Temple, as well as much of the plans and models that Gaudí had prepared, being totally destroyed in a blaze set by anarchists.

I toured the Sagrada Familia when I was in Barcelona in 1994. They have come a long way in 10 years, but they obviously still have light-years to go. Gaudí was in his 70s when he died after being run down by a tram in 1926. Fortunately for everyone involved, he realized early on that there was no way that he was going to survive to see the Sagrada Familia completed, so he dropped everything and dedicated the last 12 years of his life to creating designs for future architects and builders to work from. Much of the work that was lost during the fire was painfully pieced back together after the conclusion of the civil war and construction continued. Many of his designs were so new and radical that they required an entirely different form of architecture to be developed to make construction feasible. Even by today’s standards, Gaudí’s designs are mind-bending. Now imagine how they appeared to people at the turn of the 20^th century. I’m surprised that he wasn’t accused of being a pagan and burned at the stake.

The Sagrada Familia was crawling with tourists when I arrived. Waiting in line was necessary to see just about every corner of the place. Even standing in the park across the street to get a long-shot photo of the Nativity Façade required an interminable wait while all the people in front of me got their shots and got the hell out of the way, sometimes taking maddening amounts of time to get all their friends posed just right. The worst part was the stairs going up and then back down the 18 story high towers. Walking up almost 100 meters (328 feet) is bad enough on its own, but when you have to do it in slow motion, one agonizing step at a time, following a sluggish, bumbling herd of chattering tourists most of the way, your leg muscles start to quiver and poop out on you in a hurry. Of course, in my typical moronic, balls-out approach to doing everything, I opted to take the long tour that took me to the very top of the tower, whereas most of the less stout and arguably smarter people turned around and headed back down at the shortcut detour on around the 250^th step.

Getting to the top was only mildly unbearable. Going down was what destroyed me. I was doing all right until I got stuck behind two British women just after passing the spot where the shortcut turnaround rejoined the downward flow of people. These women were obviously scared shitless by descending the spiral stairs. In their defense the stairs were kind of shallow, frighteningly steep and there was no inside railing. This gave you the feeling that if you took a bad step, you would plummet to your death right down the open holed center, violently ricocheting off the steps and walls, taking out a couple dozen other tourists in the process. These details would have made just about anyone a little extra cautious, but these women were definitely overdoing it as they inched their way down, carefully planting both feet on every step, with a hand-over-hand death-grip on the outside railing. This forced all of us to stack up behind them to work our quadriceps like endurance pack mules. The last hundred steps were the worst. There was no place to stop and rest without holding up all of the people behind me. My quads were at the failure point the whole time and during every step down I felt that there was the distinct possibility that my legs were going to collapse under me and make the women’s nightmare of falling down the stairs a harsh reality. I barely made it to the bottom without catastrophe and the ungodly workout wounded me so thoroughly that I was sore and walking funny for two days afterward.

The Ramblas is the social nexus of Barcelona day or night. The Ramblas is a huge, paved boulevard running down the center of one of the busier streets in the city. This is the place where people come to meet, walk, browse newsstands, flower shops and bird stalls, hangout at cafes, watch street performers, dodge beggars and criminals and partake in the occasional pick-up round of illegal gambling. One of the more popular, but dodgier pastimes on the Ramblas is the classic hide the red ball under three cups game. Obviously this “game” is simply a scam designed to detach rubes from their money, but in Barcelona the art of evading the authorities has been brought to all new levels of brilliance. My favorite enhancement is the genius who devised the practice of replacing the three cups with hollowed-out carrot tops and the ball with a small berry. With this arrangement, when the fuzz decides to raid the area, the hustler can simply scoop up the whole game in one hand, shove it in his mouth and a few chews later all the evidence is well on its way to being turned into poop! It’s amazing how creative grifters can be when it comes to avoiding the law. If they applied even half of this ingenuity to a legitimate job, they’d probably be hugely successful.

Depending on your state of mind, the sensory overload of the Ramblas can become oppressive at times. When this happens I like to find relief in nearby Plaça Reial where the exorbitant prices at the cafes are just barely tolerable for the opportunity to have a lingering rest in its pleasant surroundings or if you just want a bench to sit on, Gaudí’s Güell Plaza on the opposite side of the Ramblas is a small retreat where you can loiter and quietly contemplate about the twisted upbringing that allowed Gaudí to dream up his agreeably bizarre designs.

At night, the Ramblas is the staging area for every debauchery imaginable. It’s also purportedly the best place, apart from the beach, to get held up at knife point, so it’s wise to travel in large numbers. Countless bars, clubs and discothèques are within a one or two block jaunt off the entire length of the Ramblas, so the area is a constant parade of drunks, perpetually exuberant Spaniards, and tourists who have come to pit their all-night stamina against said Spaniards. Take my word for it, the Spaniards will run your ass right into the ground and still have plenty left in the tank to keep partying long after you’ve limped to bed in disgrace.

Mid-way through my stay I got sucked into embarking on an unabashed tourist outing with several hostel-mates to the Magic Fountain at the National Palace. Each Friday, this fountain puts on a light and water display choreographed to music, much like the water fountains in front of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, but on a much smaller scale. After a short preview with a mix of music, the highlight was a show set to the song “Barcelona,” by the late Freddie Mercury of Queen and the opera singer Montserrat Caballe. It was a shameless city-promotional ploy, but it sure as hell worked on us. It was surprisingly beautiful and we all applauded like idiots afterward, even though the developer that was deserving of the applause was probably at home eating dinner.

Crime is definitely on the rise in Barcelona. I started hearing stories while I was still in the south of Spain about people being pickpocketed or things disappearing on the beach, but the stories got even scarier after I arrived. As usual, many of these incidents could have almost certainly been avoided if the victim had used a little more common sense, but several daring muggings happened in very crowded areas, one in broad daylight on the Ramblas. Spain has always been one of those places where I have felt a little extra safe, even in the larger cities, seeing as how the streets are taken over each night by strolling families and street cafes, making even dimly lit back alleys seem well traveled and harmless, but I prudently decided to crank up the danger sense while I was in Barcelona to avoid becoming a statistic.

Along with the unpleasantness of crime, alarming destitution seems to have increased as well. The Ramblas and major tourist sights are overrun with beggars, unwashed, burned out junkies, mental and physical cripples and “others” either doing some kind of bizarre street performing while a cohort begs for change (Have you ever heard a hopelessly drunk, 50 year old chain smoker try to sing the blues, un-amplified and a capella? It ain’t pretty.) or just pathetically sprawled on the sidewalk, unconscious, with a sign that begs for money in three languages propped up against a McDonald’s paper cup. The only place that I’ve seen that comes close to equaling the level of miserable indigence that can be seen around central Barcelona are a few ugly neighborhoods in Amsterdam. The good news is that these hard luck cases are, by and large, not overtly aggressive when it comes to begging. The most insistent people tend to be the elderly, toothless ladies who will actually grab your arm and try to stop you in your tracks or the strung out, aging punkers who like to team up and go through the crowd three or four at a time begging for tips for the entertainment being provided by their friend playing an extended re-mix of “Old McDonald Had a Farm” on the recorder.

Near the end of a long day of walking, I finally gave in to the suppressed tourist urgings within me and decided to visit the Pablo Picasso Museum. I was passing the place anyway and after about the third sign indicating that I was getting closer and closer to the joint, it became clear that fate was commanding me to beat back my aversion to the art of painting and see what a genius in this field could do. I kept following the signs until I arrived at a square. There was no indication as to where to go next, so I just continued straight into the next street across the square. About a block later I ran into another sign for the museum pointing back toward the square. This time when I got the square, I walked the entire perimeter, looking for the museum. There was nothing. Just shops and cafes. While I was teetering in confusion, I noticed a tiny little plaque off on a side street that said “Pablo Picasso Museum” and then gave an address that should have been just a few doors down the street. I walked to the door which turned out to be an apartment building and couldn’t find any more signs. I wandered around in circles for about 20 minutes before the obvious conclusion hit me. There wasn’t any fricking Picasso Museum! It was all just a huge practical joke on us tourists! I bet the tourism bureau has a hidden camera set up in that square and they sit around the monitor all day, laughing like Beavis and Butthead at the tourists staggering around looking for a museum that doesn’t exist. In fact, I’ll lay odds there wasn’t even a Picasso at all! The whole thing is probably one huge practical joke that somebody started in the early 1900s and the gag has just grown and been wildly disseminated over the years, just like Christianity. Whoops, better not go there.

I could talk about Barcelona for another 3,000 words and still not do justice to the city, so I’ll save you the eye strain and leave you with this…If you believe the hype, Barcelona might be the reigning tourist danger zone in western Europe at the moment. My feelings are that there’s danger and then there’s trouble that comes with being inattentive, naïve, ignoring basic common sense and being helplessly drunk. Out of the 20-some stories I heard about being robbed in Barcelona, all but one could have been avoided by keeping a firm grasp on the basics of personal safety. Keep your wits about you and you shouldn’t have any more trouble in Barcelona than you would in Chicago. In the sheer oh-wow sense, Barcelona’s offerings are paralleled only by Paris, London and Rome. This is not something you want to miss. Chain your wallet to you underwear and prepare to be awed.