Barcelona visit reveals beauty of history From castles to cafes, places tell people’s tales

To introduce ourselves to Barcelona, our family of three read George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia.” In this memoir of the treachery and odd humor of the Spanish Civil War, Barcelona appears as the site of factional street fighting, cafe to cafe. But it isn’t long before the most sensible of human agreement ensues, an unspoken deal between factions as they eye each other across a couple of roofs, essentially, “You don’t shoot me and I won’t shoot you.”

Today, when visitors witness these same rooftops, it’s usually from the playful vantage point of one of several of Antoni Gaudi’s apartment buildings, where chimneys morph into abstract sculptures of shell-like spirals and mushrooms, shapes that are more common on a windswept desert than an urban roof. From this prosperous perspective, Orwell’s memoir seems a misleading introduction to today’s Barcelona, where the visitor finds few reminders of war. There’s the massive Gothic structure, which burned for 13 days during the civil war, yet still it stands, its bareness only adding to its grandeur. And then there are the canons outside Castell de Montjuic Hill, reminding one and all of the time when Franco turned his artillery on the city.

My family, a group of three plus our nephew, was visiting family who had fallen in love with Barcelona and taken an apartment there. We were hoping Orwell might give us a more objective lens through which to understand the city.

We spent six days in Barcelona and its environs, lodged in our relatives’ expansive apartment across from the rolling ocean facade and seaweed railings of Gaudi’s La Pedrera, one of two apartment buildings Gaudi designed that now are open to the public. Accompanied by a gang of four teenage cousins (the two we brought being matched by two in Spain), our hosts treated us to a nonstop array of amazing meals, glorious museums and fabulous walks beside the most elegant assortment of buildings. From that swirl, certain moments emerge most strongly, among them an afternoon spent in El Xampanyet, a narrow tapas bar in the old quarter. Having sent the gang of kids off to school for the day, we were just four adults for lunch and we took full advantage, occupying our table for at least two hours. The proprietors, a roundheaded man in his 70s and his buxom, black-haired wife sporting a red satin shirt, had matching twinkles in their eyes as they delivered plates of dried tomatoes bathed in olive oil, small pizzas topped with artichokes, little egg-and-onion soufflelike omelets, along with fish dishes of tuna, caracoles and mussels.

We had returned the day before from a foray north to some ancient Greek and Roman ruins on the Costa Brava – the northern coast of Spain – and a stay in a small castle that had been transformed into a hotel. From our room in the castle tower that late March afternoon, we watched the sun set over misty fields stretching to distant mountains. Peering through the castle’s window slits – made for arrows to exit, but not enter – we could see the even furrows of the turned soil, ready for new planting, bordered by poplars that came straight out of a Monet painting. This small castle, relatively unimportant in the scheme of Spanish history, was like a child’s model, a bit of perfection in miniature. Given to a captain who served under Christopher Columbus hundreds of years before, it had one tower, one chapel, one tiny moat and magnificent underground stone archways in the catacombs that now serve as a bar. Just below the castle wound a few streets of stucco homes and tile-roofed clay buildings, all we needed for a town. It was a magical stay, complete with a manorial dinner in the great hall – leaving us feeling entirely regal. The next day as we wandered the town, we watched with adult smiles as our gang of teenagers, having piously lit candles in the chapel, spent the morning jousting each other with long, dried stalks that grew on the edges of last year’s fields. They, too, had been touched by history.

The hotel, Castell d’Emporda (www.castelldemporda.com), was relatively inexpensive, especially in today’s Spain, costing from $122 for the tower room off-season to $243 for a garden room in season. It sits on the edge of La Bisbal d’Emporda, Spain’s ceramic capital, and not far from a spot along the Mediterranean where the extensive ruins of Empuries lie. Ancient Greeks had come here to trade, followed by ancient Romans. The foundations of their two towns have been excavated, along with the ducts through which Romans heated (with the help of slaves) and transported their bath water. A walk along a beachside path of little more than half a mile to the north yielded a small village offering adjacent restaurants, pizza for the kids and Meson del Conde (www.mesondelconde.com), a fully Spanish lunch for the adults. March being the season of spring onions, we feasted on tender leeklike things blackened on the grill and served, in this case, on clay roof tiles. Pulling off the charred outer skin of the spring onion, from stem to bulb, we dipped the soft insides into a red, tangy sauce.

The Roman ruins of Empuries were echoed in Barcelona by a visit to the old quarter and the Museum of History of the City, where a medieval church was built upon ancient Roman stones. Both are brilliantly displayed in an exhibit that winds beneath the city, through underground passageways revealing the large clay vats in which Roman Barcelonans dyed the cotton they grew. Elsewhere the excavation focused on the beginnings of Christianity in Spain, with the early church built on top of Roman stones.

We had also been to the National Museum of Catalan Art on Montjuic, which houses the Romanesque frescoes and sculptures of the provincial churches, saving them from the avarice of art dealers who were stripping tiny churches in the hills of Catalonia. Though I seldom seek out religious art, I found that the colors, humor and detail of these early Christian paintings still resonate. What an amazing capacity humans have to create art of all kinds!

In some ways, they echoed the fascinating shapes and brilliant colors of the work of Gaudi. I had been entranced with Gaudi as a teenager, amazed that architecture could be so playful. What I realized in visiting Barcelona was that Gaudi had ancestors in the exuberant architecture and ironwork of his homeland. Cavernous spaces already were beginning to echo the forms of nature, and Gaudi took it to its limits, creating rooms with no right angles, ceilings vaulted like rib cages, park benches reminiscent of the teacups of amusement parks, and the vegetal spires of his church, La Sagrada Familia, under construction since 1882.

Though our trip north tightened our time in Barcelona – so many museums, so many cafes, so many quarters to view – it gave us the perspective we as Mainers needed. How could a person come to the United States and just see New York? We had traveled just an hour out of Barcelona when our road suddenly became blocked by dozens of sheep and two shepherds, a young African and an old Spaniard, ambling along, pushing their charges onward. On this back road, in this meeting of van and sheep, I felt grounded in this Spain where traditions such as the spring onions and full leisurely meals are central to the full, savoring life.

Even though we spent much of our day inside museums, ultimately travel isn’t about adding to one’s personal collection of museums and monuments. We travel to further understand what it is to be human and to live on this earth, to realize by walking the very stones where they occurred, whether it’s a Roman mosaic or the cave that remains from the spot that once had been the Jewish synagogue of Barcelona, that history was not just a story, that real people lived it.

On our last full day in Barcelona, we spent the morning at the Picasso museum, amazed at the sensitivity of the portraits he created when but a teenager. It was from there that we headed into El Xampanyet, the tapas bar. Our group had a lot to talk and laugh about. Every so often, I would look up from our table and one or the other proprietor would be laughing, too, bright-eyed, joking with a customer. I know nothing of this couple’s history, but my impression was of people soaking in the goodness of life, delighting in succulent food washed with wines of all kinds, salted with constant teasing. Life may not have been easy for this older couple, still working, but surely it was lightened by laughter and by a deep appreciation for the texture and taste of nature’s bounty. I recalled Orwell saying of Barcelonans, “They have, there is no doubt, a generosity, a species of nobility, that do not really belong to the twentieth century.” In Spain, the question “What do you do?” that is so rampant in this country never came up. The issue is not what you do, but how you live, and that cannot be asked, it can only be shown.

Donna Gold can be reached at carpenter@acadia.net.