Candy-Coated, Stream-Lined Rocket Ships by Mark Eveleigh
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Neri Hotel & Restaurant
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Vibrant, vivacious and vanguardista, Barcelona has become famous as one of Europe’s most exciting and cosmopolitan cities. Basking in the balmy Mediterranean breeze, yet within easy reach of the slopes of the high Pyrenees, it is not surprising that the Catalan capital has long been considered Spain’s best city in which to live. The rich and beautiful have embraced a lifestyle that is known as ‘tropical chic,’ and every year almost four million visitors are lured here by an urge to sample the many charms of life in this Mediterranean playground.
A century ago the city’s most famous son, Antonio Gaudí, was building the Sleeping-Beauty palaces, enchanted parks and Hansel-and-Gretel houses that are still among the city’s main tourist draw-cards. Even today they seem such a part of a fantasy fairytale dreamland that weeks after you have first set eyes on them you find yourself asking ‘did they really exist?’
You come across Gaudí’s works all over the city, like unexpected treats - jellies, marshmallows and sugar swirls - in an already rich, and potentially fattening, plum-cake. And to take the analogy to its logical (if slightly ridiculous) extreme, the icing on the cake is undeniably the candy-coated, streamlined rocket-ships that are the great spires of the Sagrada Familia Basilica.
The ‘Sacred Family’ was a work of such unimaginable audacity - only the fact that several rich patrons had the courage to believe in him stopped Gaudí-the-genius from being remembered (or more likely forgotten) as Gaudí-the-madman - that it is only now that we dare hope that the next generation might see it completed. This is possibly the world’s most astounding and saddest building - sad because it reminds us of the curse of mortality and the likelihood that we may not live long enough to see the Sagrada Familia’s rocket-ships in all their glory, freed of the clanking cranes that seem to tether them to the earth.
Eighty years after this inspired architect-naturalist-visionary-lunatic was knocked over and killed by a tram (he had dedicated all he had to this work and it was a long time before anyone recognized the ‘tramp’ for who he was) his bizarre works stand as a monument to the fact that in Barcelona anything goes.
A part of the philosophy of tropical chic Catalan style is that you ‘go with the flow.’ In a city that truly believes in living 24/7 you can eat when you want to, party when you want to, shop when you want to…and sleep only when necessary.
If you want to ‘go local,’ however, Barcelona’s nightlife can take a little getting used to. It is unusual to eat before ten o’clock, to make an appointment to meet friends in a bar before 10:30 or to enter a nightclub before midnight. Bars are open throughout the night, many cafés operate around the clock and at restaurants you can book a table for two o’clock, or even three o’clock, in the morning.
Spanish in general are ‘nomadic’ in their nightlife; they will very often visit 8 or 10 bars in a quiet night out. The best way for a visitor to get the feel of Catalan living is to copy this system and to dine slowly, throughout the long evening from the seemingly endless array of tapas (snacks) that are displayed behind the glass cabinets on the bars. You simply point at whatever takes your fancy; and it often seems that everything takes your fancy. There are steaming plates of sopa de peix (fish soup) and succulent pelota meatballs, there are fresh Mediterranean prawns, octopus and calamari, and there are finely-marbled Serrano hams, richly-stocked paellas and spicy black-puddings from other parts of the country.
Whether you are sipping cava on a sunny terrace by the marina, dancing in one of the uptown hotspots or simply touring the old bars around Las Ramblas, the casual, carefree Bar-celona bar-scene will leave you with some of the fondest memories of your stay in the city.
It often seems that it is impossible to get from A to B in Barcelona without crossing the bustling congregation of street artists, mimes, jugglers, buskers, flower-sellers, fortune-tellers, tourists and con-men that gather day-and-night along the tree-lined avenue of Las Ramblas. But then again, perhaps we are just sub-consciously drawn back to what has, since time immemorial, been the hub of the city’s activity, and remains Spain’s most iconographic street.
Just to the east of Las Ramblas - beyond the old Plaça Reial with the fantastic dragon-lampposts that were Gaudí’s first commission - is the Gothic Quarter, known in Catalan as the Ciutat Vella (Old City). This medieval warren with its grotesque gargoyles, mighty walls and shadowy alleys is the perfect contrast to the almost transparent weightlessness of Modernist Barcelona. Home to classy boutiques and irresistible patisseries and delicatessens during the daytime, these alleyways are crammed with busy bars and restaurants after dark.
The thronging street-life of Las Ramblas, the glitz and shine of uptown Barcelona, the thrilling high-life of the marina area, the Mediterranean light and space of the beaches or the haunting history of Barri Gòtic…Barcelona prides itself on its ability to combine cultures and experiences.
It was to celebrate this character that the city hosted last year’s ‘Universal Forum of Cultures.’ The inhabitants of this excitingly cosmopolitan and vanguardista city see themselves as champions in the cause of world peace and understanding…and they would like to think that Barcelona is pointing the way towards a future that is brighter even than the most colourful creations in Gaudí’s fantasy fairytale dream-world.
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