Barcelona - turístic inferno

We’ll be leaving Barcelona tomorrow and we’re still not sure what to think of the place. It’s a dynamic and beautiful city with architectural marvels stretching from the medieval through to the moderisme, or art nouveau, to modern and post-modern; Gaudi is the architectural star, of course, and the Sangrada Familia, the symbol of Barcelona around the world, is a wonderfully strange concoction, still unfinished, and the city’s planners have maintained Gaudi’s curves and natural forms in many of the buildings put up since his death in 1926.

The geography of the city adds to its appeal: it goes from beaches to large hills in a short distance and it has beautiful harbours, but I think Barcelona is being destroyed by tourists and the fact that we’re just another two of the 10 million or so who come every year just makes be feel more ambivalent not just about Barcelona but about tourism in general. We often felt we were trapped in an insane theme park and it probably didn’t help that our apartment was right in the middle of La Rambla, one of the main tourist hot-spots, though the beachside and harbourside areas are probably just as bad. It’s hard to tell if there are any locals about in La Rambla, except for the thousands of shopkeepers, restauranteurs, waiters, shop assistants, beggars and living statues. It seems that almost everyone wandering the streets is a tourist and the crush is often hard to believe. It goes on all day and night on La Rambla, which is a beautiful street with a pedestrian walkway going through its middle.

The street stretches from the harbour and beaches for one and a half kilometres and goes through the Barri Gotic or Gothic Quarter, where it is possible, in some of the narrow labyrinthine laneways with their 6 story buildings on either side, to forget the tourist circus, though you’ll often come from a secluded lane into a square that can be almost as insane as La Rambla itself.

Federico Garcia Lorca said that La Rambla is “the only street in the world which I wish would never end” but I assume he’d be appalled by it now. Is it doomed to remain as insane as it is now? It can probably only get worse unless something is done to stem the tourist tide and that seems unlikely - we saw two massive cruise ships facing each other in the harbour today, both like floating, gigantic apartment blocks and so many jobs and businesses would now depend on the influx of invaders from all over the world. I think Lorca would cry, quite frankly.

There are some great things, of course. The markets, called Mercat der Sant Josep, are the most vibrant food markets we’ve ever seen, with everything from the most delicious looking fruit and fruit juices - with concoctions like coconut and raspberry and papaya and mango - to the most bewildering range of meat products ever assembled: huge livers, giant hams, sheep’s heads grinning in a macabre fashion, their eyes still bright and clear, huge sheets of tripe, bright pink piglets looking like larger versions of the piglet pastries we saw in Paris. It goes on and on and is worth spending time in until, once again, the crush of sweaty, pot-bellied, camera-toting tourists turns it into a ordeal.

We took a few bus tours all around the city, using the system that allows you to travel as many times as you like in two days after purchasing a ticket, but we soon realised that there was hardly any point in getting off at any of the stops because the wait would be too long to get back on another one. And the line-up at the beginning of the bus routes can be sickeningly long. The most popular route is the one that takes in the Sagrada Familia, and I was hoping the have a good look at this weird cathedral, which is breathtaking when you first see it - in fact, this was probably the main reason why we decided to include Barcelona on our itinerary. But the queue at the Sagrada is obscene - we only had to take one look to make our minds up to forget about getting off the bus. And every site of interest in Barcelona costs money, unlike London, where all the major art galleries and museums are free (what a wonderful thing!) so umble folk like us could have our budgets depleted quickly here.