Life, love, and Barcelona

November 12, 2023

A few years ago, a friend said: “Everybody should love something as much as Kat loves Barcelona.”

He’d seen how much joy I get out of being in Barcelona, something that is true of Spain in general and has been ever since I was 19 and left the U.S. for the first time to study for a semester in Toledo, Spain. Y me enamoré de España (I fell in love with Spain). Every part of Spain is so distinctive, but Barcelona captured my heart at the next level.

And now I finally live here and haven’t quite processed it yet.

The thing I tried to make happen for nearly half my life – off and on, not continuously –  is now reality. I really, really like Valencia; my waxing poetic about Barcelona is no more a dis on Valencia than my moving to Valencia was a dis on NYC. All three cities, along with Madrid and Rome, would be in my five top cities in the world to live in. But I fell hard for Barcelona before I ever visited Valencia, even before I visited New York City, where I lived for 12 years. And the desire to live in Barcelona had stayed in me, como una espinita clavada (a disappointment or frustration I never got over). I’d had several near-misses over the years, but instead of convincing me that Barcelona wasn’t for me, they only made me more determined to get here.

But, Kat, WHY do you like Barcelona so much? No te entiendo (I don’t understand you).

I’ve heard this often over the years. Especially from madrileños, I have to say 

I can’t explain any better than most can explain why they fell for a significant other, but I will try. It’s far more a tale of the heart than a cold, calculated decision.

First, we’ll start back when I was about 7 years old, growing up in Davenport, Iowa, with its frigid winters, and declared to my parents and younger sister that when I grew up, I was going to live in a big city with warm weather by the sea. Some of our tastes change over the years, many of mine certainly have. But I only dug further into my love for the sea, for big cities and for avoiding very cold weather. Barcelona fits all three criterion (so does Valencia), while Madrid, as you may have heard, “no tiene playa” (doesn’t have a beach).

And once I studied in Spain, in Toledo and Madrid, I wanted to live in Spain for an extended, indefinite or permanent period.

I’ve always loved architecture, for several years around junior high/early high school, I thought I might become an architect. Barcelona is one of the best cities in the world for my taste in architecture.

The modernism of Gaudí, Domenech I Muntaner, Puig i Cadafalch has captivated people the world over. And I love bright colors, originality, distinctive shapes. I used to joke that my version of “NYC all-black” was to wear my Gaudi-patterned Inkkas slip-on shoes and a multi-colored dress. Barcelona combines modernist architecture with Gothic as in the Cathedral or Santa María del Mar, as well as modern like Ricardo Bofill’s airport terminals or Hotel Vela (W Hotel) or Enric Miralles Moya’s Mercat de Santa Caterina.

I never visited Barcelona until some years after the 1992 Olympic Games, so my first impressions were of a city buoyed by the Olympics. Barcelona is among the only, if not the only, cities/places in the past few decades that has truly been reshaped in a positive way by hosting an Olympics or World Cup. I could lose myself in the narrow streets of El Gótico or Raval or Born, gaze upwards endlessly at the beautiful facades of the buildings on the wide avenues of L’Eixample or wander around Gracia or Poblenou.

There’s fantastic food all over Spain. I am more drawn to seafood, especially as it was always a treat growing up in landlocked Iowa, so cities and regions of Spain where seafood is a star player are music to my ears. And Spain’s cuisine has experienced creative renaissance with world-famous chefs like Ferran Adria, Carme Ruscalleda, Pedro Subijana or Juan Mari Arzak combining new twists with traditional fare.

There’s a unique blend of vanguardista and traditional in Barcelona, infusing creative spirit from local and global entrepreneurs and artists alike while retaining a distinctly Catalan flavor and business approach.

The sea is always calling me, I can’t look at the sea without smiling, so I am far more drawn to the sea than the mountains, but Barcelona is blessed to be tucked between mar & montaña, sea and mountains. On previous visits to Barcelona, I have taken the train up to the Carretera de les Aigües and run along the trails, then run downhill along the regal, mansion-lined Avinguda del Tibidabo and Carrer del Balmes, thinking of the description in Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s “La Sombra del Viento” (The Shadow of the Wind) only to finish my run with a jump in the Mediterranean.

Madrid is a marvelous city to live in (except it doesn’t touch the sea!!), yet Barcelona to me has a skyline that grabs you from first glimpse in a way that few other cities do.

And over two decades of visits to Barcelona, I’ve had myriad little interactions that combined left a romantic and idealized version of Barcelona that surely isn’t the only reality, but it is my lived experience. Whether a meet-cute “Before Sunrise” that spanned Madrid and Barcelona (but did not end in marriage) or one of the best long weekends in my life spent in Barcelona with one of my best friends and included serendipitous meetings, a birthday, great food and a wonderful hotel; a work trip that included a Clásico at Camp Nou or waiters who remember me after I haven’t visited in two years; all of it only locked that espinita clavada further into my mind.

Lastly but certainly not least, I’ve been welcomed marvelously in Barcelona whenever I have come. This is true all over Spain, but since so many people – from Barcelona and not – tell me that “catalanes están cerrados” (Catalans are closed-off), it warrants mentioning. I’ve been invited to birthday parties, weddings, to stay overnight at peoples’ homes, invited to extended family gatherings, taken to favorite nooks and rincones of Cataluña, given family recipes, recommended for jobs, given family recipes and treated to lovely meals out. And that’s despite my Catalan language skills still being pretty poor, I can read articles or understand conversation if not too fast and I might have to ask a word translation or two.

I know that in the present day, as wasn’t as much the case when I first visited Barcelona two decades ago, the huge growth in foreigners living in Barcelona as well as mass tourism has created some tensions with increasing costs and the loss of local feel in many neighborhoods. I can’t help but be one more foreigner here, but I hope to be only “media guiri” with my love for and exploration of Barcelona and beyond.

Barcelona, home at last.

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  • Stay True - by Hua Hsu. Fantastic book (Pulitzer Prize winner) by a man whose close friend, with whom he had a complicated relationship about their different relationships to being first-generation Asian-American; was murdered while they were in college at Berkeley