Return to Barcelona
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The display of Catalonia's feast of Sant Jordi at the executive palace (Photo by Criselda Yabes)
It was the celebration of Catalonia’s patron saint, Sant Jordi (or St. George), who slew the dragon that was about to swallow up a princess. The blood oozing out of the dragon from Sant Jordi’s penetrating sword turned into roses. My host, Isabel, said this story was “infantile,” but that it was what birthed a tradition that people of Barcelona have celebrated for years.
That was why on that day also happened to be a romantic one. The part about the books came later; it was said that when women were offered the roses, they returned the gesture with a book. One of the ladies whispered to me in French, “We do the thinking, but why do we also do the spending?” (because a book, especially nowadays, costs more than a stem of rose).
It was a day I absolutely enjoyed even though there was no one around to give me a rose. I walked the stretch from the top of the Paseo de Gracia, where you see the iconic Casa Pedrera, and a bit further down past Casa Batlo, the bottleneck for selfie shooters, and all the way down to Plaça Catalunya. I browsed the books and at last found something, translated into Spanish from French, that I could offer as a gift to Isabel.
Finally, it felt that I was truly back in Barcelona: the voices I heard around me were in Spanish. For about a week of walking around this city, I had to wade through packs of tourists mostly speaking French, of which some words were similar to Catalan, the language of Catalonia, whose capital is Barcelona and is closer to the French border.
I was here nearly ten years ago, tracking down the streets in Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s trilogy. If Zafon were still around (he died of cancer in 2020), I’m not sure he’d like that the Barcelona of his birth has become a popular tourist destination that seems to know no bounds. At least that was how I felt; as if it had lost a bit of how I had imagined it from my first trip, when there were fewer tourists and it was cool to be casual, not harried; when I could try my Spanish-Chabacano, and not speak English or French.
Returning to Barcelona was a plan long in the making, because I wanted to walk on Las Ramblas again – starting from Plaça Catalunya up to the sea, the edge of Barceloneta. I couldn’t bear to see the changes. Open-air restaurants almost filled the Ramblas, with barkers enticing passersby to sit at their table. You walk faster, squeezing through a horde, crushing your dream of traipsing down memory lane in a dress and espadrilles.
There was a familiar accent: an Ilocano-speaking woman selling empanadas. As a gesture of solidarity, I bought one with spinach (and two raisins tucked in) for 5 euros. She told me there was a vegan restaurant further into the side street past the Farmacia Nadal, which I knew by heart. But when I got there, what I found was a Filipino restaurant offering lechon kawali on the menu. This wasn’t as bad as paying almost 10 euros for five tiny pieces of churros and a small cup of hot chocolate just because you ordered it in a mediocre café that had a splendid view of the omnipresent Sagrada Familia.
My goal was to walk to the sea every day. From Sagrada Familia, I followed by instinct an avenue that had my mother’s name: Joan. It was the Passeig de Sant Joan, and guess what? It took me to their copycat Arc de Triomphe – nothing like the real one in Paris, of course, but it had a sizeable crowd and led to a garden and a zoo.
Barcelona's own Arc de Triomphe, on the way to the sea (Photo by Criselda Yabes)
Over the heads of the tourists, I could see Barcelona again with its classical and modernist buildings that doesn’t fail to awe, at every turn of my eyes.
That was when I discovered Estacio de França, and my mouth gaped. I was back in the time of Casablanca-like movies. There was hardly any activity; neither trains nor people, considering that it’s the city’s second busiest station, serving the outlying towns, quite unlike the gray and utterly functional main Sants in the neighborhood where I stayed. The França station is closer to the sea: I was making my way to the district of Barceloneta.
The exquisite architecture of the Estacio de Franca, supposedly the second busiest train station in Barcelona (Photo by Criselda Yabes)
Thinking that I could get there through a shortcut, I walked by the railroad tracks and a wall of graffiti. There were two French families with their smart phones serving as GPS, and I was struck by the coincidence. We went up a flight of stairs, a roofed passage, and I could not see Barceloneta. The landscape was a view of glass buildings and a modern university. A young student told me where to go.
I had heard that outsiders had tried to gobble up properties in Barceloneta, which were rundown compared to buildings closer to Las Ramblas, those of the Gothic quarter, the districts of Raval or Rivera by the old port. Well, no, it hasn’t been as gentrified as I thought. The laundry, the bric-a-brac, the mess, were still hanging from the balconies – scenes of a ghetto, and for some reason, it was more appealing that way.
The port of Barcelona (Photo by Criselda Yabes)
The balconies of Barceloneta (Photo by Criselda Yabes)
There were friendly cafes that perhaps Hemingway would have loved. If I could speak Catalan, if I had company, if I had time, I would have walked into the good old days of this neighborhood. None of the smoothies, poke bowls, and what-not. Not even the paella or the sangria that tourists order in another overpriced restaurant, thinking these were what the Spanish had for regular fare. Barceloneta had the plain tapas of olives and tomatoes and the regular cerveza.
Paint-peeled buildings, the labyrinth of the poor, brought me to the mouth of the playa San Miguel of sunbathers. One thing looked out of place: Pakistani migrants walking around with a bottle of rum to go with the sangria and mojito they were selling on a tray, wending their way around the lackadaisical figures lying on the sand, until the police came for them, took the rum away and made them throw the alcoholic drinks into the bin.
Sunbathers on the beach of San Miguel (Photo by Criselda Yabes)
I was lucky to have been invited by a shaman to the beach of Castelldefels, a good 20 minutes by train. It was almost empty, in this coastal town where she said the entirety of Barcelona would go for the weekends because Barceloneta has been mainly for tourists. This is also where the Argentinian footballer Lionel Messi used to live when he was with the Barça Football Club. That tidbit of information went in tandem with my new mission in Barcelona.
I wanted to see the football stadium, known as the Camp Nou which, luckily, was not crowded on the day I decided to walk there to reconnoiter. I went right in for a fee of 31 euros (20 on a Sunday). There in the stadium of one of the world’s famous clubs, I began nursing my dream of seeing the next World Cup Finals in four years. When I first came to Barcelona in 2014, I watched the finals on television in cafes.
My unfinished business was the Sagrada Familia, the basilica built to the imagination of the master Antoni Gaudi who died in the 1920s. The construction started more than a hundred years ago, and now it was announced that it might finally be completed in three years. Looking at it from the outside was spellbinding enough, but I thought the inside would be like other churches I have seen in France.
The grand basilica of Sagrada Familia, designed and created by the Catalonian master architect/artist Antoni Gaudi (Photo by Criselda Yabes)
This was my chance; rather than waiting for the next time. Although an online ticket purchasing site had cheated me. What was supposed to be 26 euros became 38 euros. I try not to think about that anymore after what I experienced when I walked into the Sagrada Familia. This requires another story altogether; but let me just say that the delinquent Catholic in me was knocked out by the splendor with which Gaudi depicted the life of Jesus Christ.
The famous Casa Batllo of Gaudi (Photo by Criselda Yabes)
Despite the many tourists around, I swear I was choking with emotion at seeing the details of the forest-like immensity of Gaudi’s creation. The coldness that I usually felt in cathedrals gave way to a torrent of spirituality, and I wanted to sit longer in the pew. Even as the tour ended and I was listening to the audiotape telling me about the symbols of the sculptures depicting death and resurrection, I still didn’t want to leave.
Making my way to the museum shop, I consoled myself with the thought that I could come back again, to this city of daydreams.
Criselda Yabes is a writer and journalist based in Manila. Her most recent books include Crying Mountain (Penguin SEA) on the 1970s rebellion in Mindanao and Broken Islands (Ateneo de Manila University Press) set in the Visayas in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan.
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