Santiago Armijos Valdivieso
My dream of knowing Spain had slipped away for many years until I finally managed to crystallize it on Sunday, February 20, 2022, when I set foot on the city of Barcelona for the first time, after a long flight from Quito, from a little over twelve hours. I did it with great expectation and, as expected, I was dazzled by all the history, art and culture that this European metropolis has kept for centuries. I landed at night at its modern “Josep Tarradellas” airport (Catalan politician who presided over the Government of the Generalitat de Catalunya between 1954 and 1980 -until 1977 he did so from exile-). As soon as I walked through its colorful and clean facilities I heard the melodious Catalan language, which to my ears sounded like a pleasant mixture of Spanish, French and Italian. A phrase that was repeated insistently was: “it is mandatory to wear the mask”Therefore, the sanitary measures continued in times of the covid-19 pandemic. Arriving in Barcelona was especially exciting because I was received as an affectionate host by my son Santiago.
The mobilization from the airport to my lodging place in the Putxet neighborhood was perfect. I did it by bus and subway with order, punctuality and cleanliness, so characteristic of first world countries. The initial place of importance that I knew was Catalonia Square, a splendid space of five hectares in which the old part of the city joins with its modern expansion, in which thousands of people congregate daily to pass through it or wander around touristically, full of statues and majestic monuments , typical of a city of world architectural reference. But if we have to talk about splendid buildings in Barcelona, I must refer to the Basilica of the Sagrada Familia. It is a dazzling religious temple whose stone walls have been sculpted, with greatness and unparalleled precision and beauty, the main passages of the Bible. This superb monument, conceived with the material with which dreams are woven, was created by Antonio Gaudí at the end of the 19th century and it is estimated that it could be completely finished by 2026, after 136 years of tireless and admirable construction. It is said that when the genius Gaudí designed the cathedral, he knew that his life would not be enough to see such a work completed, so he left three-dimensional models so that the followers of his project could accurately understand his artistic vision. . That is what has happened and is appreciated by thousands of visitors from all corners of the world. I am not exaggerating if I say that when entering the bowels of the work and contemplating its vaults, doors, walls, columns, floors, ceilings and stained glass windows; I felt the spirituality of the perfect, the beautiful and the great. Willing to discover the most attractive Catalan sites, I visited Montjuic, a mountain 177 meters above sea level that houses a beautiful castle that was an old military fortress of the Spanish army, and today, a beautiful temple of culture made up of an ethnological museum and world cultures, a dazzling botanical garden and by an old dream castle from which the imposing Barcelona is contemplated. It was a precious experience for me to visit Montjuic Castle because for a long time I had been seduced by the tetralogy of novels The Cemetery of Forgotten Books of the late Catalan writer Carlos Ruíz Zafón, whose third part The Prisoner of Heaven acts as the main stage Montjuïc Castle, in which the character David Martin (a writer nicknamed the prisoner of heaven) is imprisoned for being against the dictatorship of Francisco Franco and forced to rewrite the work of his captor Mauricio Valls, a dark broadsword of insufficient literary skill, under threat of death Isabel Gispert and her son: Daniel Sempere; the great protagonist of all four novels. My mania for underlining the best passages in books helped me on my tour of the Montjuic castle, to the point of uniting the invented world of ink and paper with that of the earth and reality. On the subject of literature, in a city like Barcelona, which has been and is the epicenter of book production in the Spanish language, given that large publishers such as Planeta, Anagrama and Tusques, among others, are based there; I had immense satisfaction. It happens that when visiting one of its most important bookstores (La Central), in the midst of thousands of volumes and standing out in a rotating device to promote recommended books, they rested with luminosity: Débora, A man kicked to death; Y, hangman life; masterpieces of Loja literature, written with the avant-garde and incomparable magic of the great Pablo Palacio; surely, the most outstanding writer of Ecuador and, possibly, among the best of South American lands. Speaking of ingenuity and imagination, I had an extraordinary pictorial experience thanks to the generous invitation of my friend Carlos Ferrer Hammerlindl (a brilliant Spanish writer), who lived for a few years in Loja and collaborated with talent and keen intelligence in the House of Ecuadorian Culture, Núcleo of Loja (currently he continues to do so from Spanish lands with literary articles for the Revista Suridea). The event was an immersive exhibition to the world of Vicent Van Gogh, in which, in a room with three hundred and sixty degrees of vision, the pictorial world of the controversial one-eared Dutch genius was projected, in which he reproduced, through images active, his beautiful and impressive paintings, full of blue and yellow tones in which roundness, comforting mystery, love of the firmament and perfection of colors and shapes prevail. The show took place in the dome of the Shopping Center the sands (located in front of Plaza España), an old and striking cylindrical building built in 1900 to house a huge bullring that closed its doors to bullfighting and then opened them to commerce and culture. To try to get to know a city, it is essential to try its gastronomy. That is why I went to the San José Municipal Market, popularly known as The Boqueria, in which the flavors of the Mediterranean and the royal Spain, raise their indexes to blurt out that they are willing to rub shoulders with the best delicacies in the world. I tried some, but olives of all colors and sizes, hake, acorn-fed ham and sweet Catalan cream; they are definitely my favourites. As if this were not enough, this gastronomic temple is located on Las Ramblas, one of the most beautiful and crowded places in the city. It is a pedestrian avenue of one point three kilometers that joins the Catalonia Square with the old port of the city, where thousands of people, from all corners of the planet, enjoy the seductive Catalan atmosphere, street art and cozy terraces that encourage bohemian, wine, tapas, the talk and the friendship. For all this, I now understand how right several of the riders of the boom Latin American literary experience of falling madly in love with the city of the counts and settling there, in the sixties, as the new literary capital of Latin America. This is so true that, regarding the reciprocal love between Barcelona and Latin America, the Catalan journalist Xavi Ayén, in his book Those boom years: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa and the group of friends who changed everything, he says with precision and emotion: “The city I am talking about (Barcelona), my city, began to change at the end of the 1960s, when the almost complete boom landed at El Prat Airport. The streets were filled with Latin Americans and, although they had a thousand trades — each one practiced several — quite a few had a novel in the middle of writing in their suitcase. (…) Its streets seemed like an animated Monopoly of the Latin American canon. A board where residents Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, José Donoso, Jorge Edwards, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Rafael Humberto Moreno-Durán, Nélida Piñón, Óscar Collazos, Mauricio Wacquez, Cristina Peri Rossi, Ricardo Cano Gaviria and regular visitors such as Julio Cortázar —who got out of a rattling van from Paris—, Carlos Fuentes —always with a woman hanging from his arm—, Octavio Paz —recently exiled from India—, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza —who came from his house in the Majorcan town of Deià—, Borges—who commented ‘it’s very cold’, surprised to see that the city was not rocked by a tropical climate—, Pablo Neruda—who arrived incognito to avoid the suspicions of the regime— or Álvaro Mutis”. I don’t know if Barcelona is one of the three most beautiful metropolises in Europe because I know very few, but I can say that it is a beautiful city, very special, that makes the visitor fall in love, every day and everywhere, to the point of turning him into his lover for the whole life.