The surreal arcs of Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família … The flash of Blaugrana (Blue and Red, the colors of Barça) football … The delights of the Ramblas¹ and its crowded Mercat de la Boqueria … The Bohemia of Picasso … or simply beaches, wine and food … In the nearly three decades since the 1992 Olympics, Barcelona has become a household name worldwide, evoking these images and others. A destination for millions of tourists each year, including stopovers on Mediterranean cruises, weekend visits for bachelor parties and longer sojourns exploring the culture, food and life of the city, strolling, cycling or watching from a sightseeing bus. An attractive home for students and scholars on Junior Year Abroad programs, European ERASMUS university exchanges and sabbaticals (remember L’Auberge éspagnole [2002]?). A model for those seeking to understand anarchist visions in the past or how contemporary urban elites can remake a city in conjunction with wide citizen participation, rethinking public spaces, civic culture and heritage: the Barcelona model. A popular destination for conventions and events that bring together global peoples and ideas. For some, more critical voices in Barcelona and abroad, perhaps also a “brand” – a shorthand for a tourist package combining a bit of beach, a few meals and bottles of wine, a glimpse of Gaudí, a walk on the Ramblas² and souvenirs made in China – a commodification that reduces Barcelona to one more tick on a global list.

Barcelona is a vital city of 1.6 million people within a surrounding polity, Catalonia, of 7.523 million people, with two millennia of history that embody myriad meanings for the varied residents and visitors who experience its historic streets and buildings as places of work, home and leisure. For them, as for us, Barcelona is a city infused by history, where Roman foundations shape modern streets while medieval and Renaissance buildings function as offices, libraries, museums, shops, restaurants and residences. Barcelona offers a palimpsest in which older layers show through the newer streets, buildings and spaces, where we follow in the footsteps of Gal.la Placídia, Wilfred the Hairy, Christopher Columbus, George Orwell, Pablo Picasso, Jean Genet, Montserrat Caballé and other figures from Catalan history, society and the arts. At the same time, the city and its citizens are grappling with serious questions about the future, ranging from the problems of climate change facing coastal cities to agonizing debates over the status of the Catalan polity of which Barcelona has long been capital – part of the Spanish state for five centuries but uneasy in that relationship.

The possibility of unpeeling layers of history and culture, of reading the city as process, is ubiquitous in Barcelona when one knows how to look. Understanding Antoni Gaudí, for example, whose works have become iconic for the Barcelona brand, is enriched by his complicated urban experiences after arriving from the industrial city of Reus. His Palau Güell, for example, was a private palace emblematic of the expanding wealth and power of that nineteenth-century industrial family. The Park Güell, far from the city center, attempted to create a private European garden city, whose failure yielded a wondrous public park. Other houses, commissioned by successful bourgeois families, claimed spaces in the city’s extension into the Eixample and nearby Gràcia. Another building, the Casa Milà / La Pedrera (the Quarry), an early multistoried apartment project, remains “incomplete” because urban unrest made the owner fear the religious imagery Gaudí intended to add. Of course, Gaudí’s most famous work, the Sagrada Família (pictured in figure 0.1), was also left unfinished at his death in 1926, pillaged during the Civil War, and used to stage controversial events under Franco. It is now engaged in a hotly debated program of “completion.”

The Ramblas themselves have a history and presence which we will examine over several chapters. One attraction on this central artery, the Mercat de la Boqueria, has become a frequent stop for visitors (while trying to maintain everyday services for residents), continuing a history of urban provisioning that includes Roman exchanges and medieval markets. The current building, constructed after nineteenth-century expropriation of convents and monasteries across the city, shelters traditional Catalan produce, fish and foodstuffs alongside new offerings for a global tourist eye. It also constitutes part of a network of 43 urban markets, from the Barceloneta to Horta and Sarrià, that have been cherished and renewed in recent decades.

Figure 0.1: Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família (Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family), Nativity Façade after 1890s by Antoni Gaudí.

Other institutions and spaces in the city exemplify layers of transformation as well. Futbol Club Barcelona, for example, was founded in 1899 by Swiss immigrant Hans Gamper (1877–1930), who devoted his life to stabilizing his club. More than a century later, Barça has become one of the richest sports associations in the world, owned by the civic club members and imbued, in victory and defeat, with a nationalist content as well as sporting expertise. If Barcelona is “més que un club” (more than a club), Madrid, too, has become more than an opposing team, especially since the end of the Civil War. And the Barcelona stadium, Camp Nou, has become a crucible of national identity. Meanwhile, Barcelona also has a second club, Espanyol, actually founded by a Catalan in 1900 at the University of Barcelona.

Even elements of the city’s tourist imagery are surprisingly complicated. The beaches touted in brochures were, only a few decades ago, contaminated by industrialization, dissected by trains and claimed by ramshackle constructions. Wine has millennia of history in Catalonia, and Barcelona has profited as a center for distribution of the rich reds and sparkling cava of surrounding comarcas (counties). Yet, in a world of paella, jamón ibérico, tapas and other imports (including couscous, sushi and fried rice), one wonders how many tourists sample traditional Catalan dishes of escudella (stew), escalivada (grilled vegetables), mongetes amb butifarra (beans and pork sausage), cargols amb allioli (snails with garlic mayonnaise), calçots (grilled onions with an almond romesco sauce that forms a winter treat) and the coques (pastries) that mark Catholic festivals throughout the year.³

While Barcelona has evolved over centuries, it also changes through the year, as public spaces foster local traditions for Barcelonins and visitors. Before Christmas each year, for example, the Cathedral square hosts the Santa Llúcia fair, where one can buy the traditional figures for a pessebre (manger scene). On April 23, the Diada de Sant Jordi (Saint George’s Day), Catalonia’s patron saint, the Ramblas and Rambla de Catalunya teem with hundreds of thousands of people buying a rose and a book as the appropriate gift for their loved one. Whenever the Barça gains a major triumph, the Canaletes fountain on the Ramblas becomes a point of celebration. And other festivals enliven the public spaces of the city’s many neighborhoods with music and food, including the spectacular street decorations of the Festes Majors of Sants or Gràcia.⁴

In preparing this book, then, we have brought our knowledge as scholars, citizens and residents of Barcelona to bear on the historical, material and cultural complexity of a city that has now become accessible in so many ways, yet which also offers many other stories that are overlooked. For those who spend time in Barcelona, the book should illuminate layers of the city through places, people and stories linked to contemporary experiences and reflections. For those who have not yet visited or lived there, it is an invitation to understand the history, landscape, spirit and divisions that made Barcelona a vital center long before its contemporary fame. Even for those who know the city well, we hope our vision will provide interesting perspectives and observations.

To facilitate deeper readings of the city, our chapters follow a broadly chronological framework that situates events, processes and places in both physical and socio-cultural terms. In each chapter, we begin by placing the reader concretely in the city, followed by an overview of local and global contexts. We explore Barcelona’s evolving growth machines: the political economic motors of control and development that created an early fortress, a mercantile capital, a commercial-industrial powerhouse in the modern period, and finally, today, a global destination. In each chapter, we incorporate the divisions and creativity of the city, including important oppositional voices and the interpretations in art, literature and music that have enriched Barcelona’s global heritage. We also highlight recurring sites and processes that embody the ongoing adaptations of a city whose modern administration stands on a hill mapped out by Barcelona’s Roman founders 2,000 years ago.

Our initial chapter begins before the city, explaining its context in a wider Mediterranean ecosystem. Roman foundations, still visible today, provided the basis for a millennium of transformation of this fortified enclave under Visigoths, Arabs and Franks. The chapter allows visitors to today’s city center to locate this heritage in time and place while appreciating its evolution.

The second chapter presents Barcelona as a Mediterranean capital, seat of the Catalan–Aragonese Empire that stretched from the Iberian peninsula to modern Greece, unified by conquest, maritime trade, social ties and a rich culture. Again, the medieval and Renaissance city has been remarkably well preserved (and polished) in the Barri Gòtic, Raval and Ribera districts. Moreover, this heritage includes not only palaces and churches but also varied civic buildings; meanwhile art, literature and music document an active, variegated metropolis.

Barcelona history, however, is not simply a series of triumphs. Plagues, invasions and economic uncertainties have tempered its long development. In chapter 3, Barcelona becomes a crucial focus in the early modern shift away from the ancient Mediterranean through Castilian expansion into the New World, the formation of the Spanish state and the growing interests of Northern European bankers, merchants and armies in the Iberian peninsula. Thus, the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries constituted a period of both growth and tragedy in the city, galvanized by its conquest by Spanish forces on September 11, 1714 – a date now transformed into a vigorous celebration of Catalan national unity, la Diada. This chapter ends with developments that foreshadowed a second Renaissance – Renaixença – in the city.

After the Napoleonic invasion of the early nineteenth century, Barcelona and Catalonia became the engine of Spain’s industrial revolution. As we show in chapter 4, this “Catalan Manchester,” building on eighteenth-century textile and agricultural commerce, established a new empire of production, finance, trade and real estate. And the city finally broke beyond the walls that had both defended and imprisoned it. In the fourth chapter, we explain this growing cityscape as a place of deep divisions of class and tradition, intertwined with increasing conflicts with the Spanish state, ending with the Universal Exposition of 1888. Again, both monuments and memories remain present, especially in the elegant nineteenth-century Eixample (expansion).

The divisions of the nineteenth century intensified in the explosive twentieth century, which we explore in chapter 5. Local elites recovered traditions of government in the Mancomunitat (Commonwealth) of Catalonia while ill-housed workers took violent opposition to urban exploitation into the streets, before a dictator, General Miguel Primo de Rivera (1870–1930), assumed control of the Spanish state. In 1929, nonetheless, it celebrated another World’s Fair that crumbled with the fall of this dictatorship and the Spanish monarchy itself. This led to the Second Spanish Republic as a time of reform across the state, and a point at which Catalonia again asserted its autonomy. This experimentation, however, was cut short by the Spanish Civil War, which saw three years of deep divisions in the city, polity and state at war before Francoist troops and their Axis allies marched into Barcelona in 1939.

Our sixth chapter explores another period of crisis – the nearly four decades of Francoist rule that fell especially hard on the rebellious Catalans. Like the difficult early modern period, this is not an era particularly marked by any monumental heritage, although the city and surrounding areas boomed with erratic development. As in earlier periods, external control was not simply endured by Barcelonins but provided challenges to be overcome in preserving social, cultural and architectural heritage, recreating economic strengths and demanding political and social rights.

Finally, the years since the death of Franco in 1975 have meant another rebirth in the city’s long history, shaped by both the triumphs and challenges of the past. In chapter 7, we seek to understand the meaning of both new events and constructions and the ongoing revaluation of monuments, language, customs and rights in the dynamic contemporary city. We must be aware of the ways in which all of these elements of everyday life have been created, contested, defended and, in some cases, remade on the foundations of the past. In our final chapter, we pose civic questions for the future, using Barcelona’s 2004 World Forum as a creative framework (figure 0.2).

While we have presented these stories with particular attention to those visiting the city, we also hope that this text, including sources for additional reading, will invite all readers further into the complexity and creativity that Barcelona and Barcelonins have offered and continue to offer as a global city. Whether rising as the capital of a medieval empire or struggling to rebuild after wars and crushing defeats, whether guided by bourgeois elites, anarchist visionaries, socialist technocrats or popular enthusiasm, Barcelona has long been a city whose transformations and alternative visions are as interesting as its extraordinary visible heritages. We presume many readers will have found their way to this book in search of more information about a city that has already charmed them. Yet, it is also important that we read Barcelona as a process – as an urban laboratory rather than an urban museum – from which vantage point the successes and failures of the city speak eloquently to many other world capitals today. The city as palimpsest makes it easy to find streets and monuments that – consciously or not – teach history and culture. We seek to share the city as a vital collective engagement and, perhaps, as a way to contribute to that collective, those processes, in the future.