This is your home, sister. This is your home, brother. Diplomat, police, 'sherpa' or bodyguard, leader, driver, European commissar, journalist, businessman landing from afar... Today, Barcelona is your home. Demonstrator, trade unionist, utopian militant, radical pacifist, immigrant, athlete, rebel with or without cause... These streets, these pages are your home. Use them and fully exploit them with your duty as your North and your enjoyment as your South.
Loyal reader, patient and welcoming city dweller, rediscover your traditional home looking at it from a different mire. A mire that will open up all the doors to your best-known charms and also to the most remote ones.
MÁS INFORMACIÓN
Now, more than ever this is your home because for a few days it will act as Europe's figurehead, as the champion of an idea and a reality that consolidated our 50-year-long peace and that we are demanding more and more off each day, especially now on occasion of the European Union's summit.
Barcelona is, in canonic terms, Catalonia's capital, Spain's traditional hard-working capital, a cluster of cultural initiative subjected to cyclical oscillations, the breeding ground for an entrepreneurial business class and for all anti-establishment adventures arising in this country.
Above anything else, however, Barcelona is the -often shy and sometimes restricted- virtual capital of a spiritual terrain, of an intangible feel: That of overlapping identities. It is mischievous and Calvinist, bourgeois and proletariat, open and self-obsessed, orderly and subversive, cautious and aggressive, Catalan and immigrant, modernist and neoclassic, traditional and daring, humble and proud: The seny and the rauxa.
Barcelona's sometimes surprising patriotism is threaded by all these elements and lies somewhere in between its achean heritage and Hanseatic city states. A patriotism orphaned of anthems and expansionist claims.
The best way to take in the local scenery is to walk it and the best way to enjoy the local people is to talk to them. Use them interchangeably. Today, tomorrow and the next time.
How? These pages contain some suggestions. Intelligent, ironic, passionate, heterodox and practical. Stroll through the city's literary universe, enjoy its modernist explosion and its civil gothic style unseen elsewhere in the Mediterranean coast. Walk through the Olympic geography, through the pleasures of sight and taste, through the outskirts and the street around the corner.
You are at home. Open the door and walk in.
* Este artículo apareció en la edición impresa del Viernes, 15 de marzo de 2002