How Gaudi's eccentric Barcelona architecture has shaped hearts and minds
To get a feeling for the Spanish city's multifaceted character, one could do no better than to follow in the footsteps of Antoni Gaudi. Words and pictures by Gary Jones.
If all has gone to plan, the people of Barcelona and the rest of Catalonia will vote today to decide whether to seek independence. Though the unofficial ballot will be purely symbolic, should it take place, many here wish to be free of Spain and go their own way, and recent weeks have seen increasing numbers of Senyera-patterned flags being hung from wrought-iron balconies across the city. The red and yellow-striped standard is distinctive, flamboyant and eye-catching, and a perfect fit for the vivacious and spirited region in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula.
Spain's second largest city, after Madrid, feisty Barcelona has long been a thrilling metropolis of politics and colour. It was a hotbed of anarchism during the Spanish civil war of the 1930s and an incendiary spirit of rebellion still resides in the city's DNA. Barcelona is also a thriving centre of fashion, art and literature, a relative heavyweight in a struggling economy, and home to (arguably) the world's most glamorous football team.
It's surprising, then, that the city's No1 son is not a charismatic, Che Guevara-like revolutionary, an effervescent entrepreneur or a supermodel-dating goal scorer. The man, past or present, who best represents Barcelona was an obsessive, celibate, penny-pinching and religiously devout architect, and marvellous monuments to his bizarre (some say "insane") genius loom and surprise across the city. To get a feeling for Barcelona's multifaceted character, one could do no better than to follow in the footsteps of eccentric Antoni Gaudi.
A pious Catholic first and foremost, Gaudi was also a fierce disciple of Catalan Modernism - a Barcelona-centred cultural movement that flourished in the final and first decades of the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively. Believing he could never improve on what had been created by God, Gaudi synthesised neo-Gothic, art-nouveau and Middle Eastern elements in his work, and made recurring use of organic forms to suggest muscles, sinew and bones, flowers, trees and seashells, and echo the gentle geography and hues of Catalonia.
"Nothing is art if it does not come from nature," Gaudi decreed.