Catalan gothic liberty

The standard image which one associates indelibly with Barcelona is that of the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi's unfinished cathedral, the spires of which dominate the skyline with their honeycomb surfaces and bunches of odd-shaped stars and planets at each pinnacle. Gaudi created the equivalent of what Shah Jehan created in Agra and Michelangelo in Rome, a monumentally-unique marvel of artistic architecture that is instantly identifiable with the city.

Barcelona has two remarkable architectural phases: The Gothic and the Art Nouveau or Liberty phases. Nothing much seems to have happened in between.

What Gaudi appears to have done is to create a phantasmagoric fusion of Gothic and Liberty in a style that is unmistakably as his own. Visiting famous Gaudi landmarks like the Casa Pedrera with its lunar landscape roof or the Park Guell with its strange dragons and Hogarth-curved walkways is an experience which will leave you quite mystified and amazed, mystified at the extraordinary imagination of the architect artist and amazed at the audacity of the Barcelonetes themselves who appear to have given carte blanche to this visionary to let his imagination run riot in their city way back at the beginning of the last century.

This boldness and zest for life still epitomizes Barcelona in all aspects. For one thing it is fiercely Catalan, meaning that its people, although nominally part of The Spains, are primarily Catalan first and Spanish afterwards.

We all hear of Catalan nationalism from time to time, most of which, unfortunately, is not of the best sort. This is not the hackneyed Spain we know with its frilly polka-dotted skirts, skintight matadors' outfits and clicking castanets but a more sober city that could be as much at home in France or even in Germany. The difference is that it is first and foremost a Mediterranean metropolis and, as such, has that lightness and joie de vivre which characterises that great sea we live in.

Wide streets with avenues of lissome trees set on a broad central pavement crisscross the city. These streets are full of buzzing open-air cafes and restaurants.

The Ramblas enclose the various quarters of the older city like the lovely Gothic quarter with its austerely beautiful churches with spires scratching the sky and stained-glass windows creating pools of multicoloured iridescence all over the somber floors and massive and soaring columns. Gothic architecture is a very perpendicular one and symbolises man reaching out to the heavens; not till practically our own lifetimes did man again create buildings which, like the infamous tower of Babel, attempted to "scrape the skies" on an ongoing basis. Having a low-cost airline to take you there and back again is indeed an added bonus however one must admit that flying to and from Gerona was harrowing especially on the return leg for which one had to leave Barcelona at that unearthly hour of 4 a.m.!

However, all told, it was a small price to pay for the amount of fun we all had.

A group of friends and I organised the details and before we knew it off we went. A stroll down the colorful Ramblas that runs from Plaza Catalunya to the sea was a de rigueur thing to do as soon as we arrived; just to get a feel of the city. Eventually, after gaping at the jugglers, marvelling at the street artistes, enjoying the music of the plentiful buskers, inspecting each and every stall and observing the infinite variety of people promenading just like us, we finally made it to the tall and graceful column from upon which Christopher Columbus gazes over the city surrounded by surprisingly Landseer-like bronze lions.

Even without Gaudi's phantasmagoria it is evident that the Barcelonetes tend to like the bizarre and the unusual with exotic Chinese Dragons holding up lamps and strangely exotic fountains. He, Gaudi, was merely the cherry on the cake; the most strikingly original of all the Barcelona architects and, of course, because of the Sagrada Familia, the most famous of all churches still being in the process of being built in modern times, a household word. One wonders whether it will eventually ever be completed. I had not been to a Tchaikovsky spectacular for decades, not since 1980 at the Royal Albert Hall, so, a concert in the highly-exotic art nouveau Palau De La Musica, consisting of excerpts from Swan Lake, the B Flat piano concerto and the 1812, was irresistible.

The interior of the Palau is like being part of Mucha poster. Dominated by an utterly-amazing inverted glass dome, the Palau interior is oval shaped and decorated in the most ornate tiling and shimmering mosaic. On either side of the stage are two sculptural groups, one of Beethoven ensconced between two sturdy columns and the other of a composer called Clavè, behind whom a marble tree stretched out over the stage.

These were the most striking things about the lovely concert hall. It was though another concert of intensely Spanish music even more appropriately put together in a hauntingly beautiful gothic gem of a church called Santa Maria del Pi that I will vividly remember. What could be lovelier than a duo of virtuoso guitarists in a recital of works consisting of Iberian favorites like Albeniz's Cordoba and Sarasate's Zapateado?

It was, though, the permanent Picasso exhibition that had me spellbound; and still does. Pablo Ruiz, as he was then, spent his early years in Barcelona, the city that, judging from his subsequent prodigious output, formed him like no other city could have done into the Pablo Ruiz-Picasso (his mother's maiden name) and, eventually, the Pablo Picasso we all know.

From his earliest works to the fascinating cubist and surrealist studies of Velasquez's Las Meninas, the exhibition traces the artist's development chronologically. With an amazing 3,600 works within its walls, including 41 rare ceramic pieces, this museum, which is housed in a graceful medieval palace, is made up of the donation of the collection of the artist's personal secretary, Jaume Sabartes, who, in 1960, established the world's first Picasso Museum in accordance with Picasso's express wish.

Barcelona is also the city of Mirò and Dalì and evidence of these strong artistic influences are everywhere.

Whether sitting in a restaurant on the waterfront eating the most mouthwatering paella or whether nibbling the endless variations of tapas in some avant-garde bar, there is going to be something somewhere that will forcibly remind you where you are. It could be a napkin or it could be a lamp, however the Catalan artistic heritage is never very far away.