Life and death of cities
Last Thursday I spent the whole day in the city of Lleida. Despite the bad weather of the previous days, it was a splendid, almost spring-like day. Even the trains behaved more or less well (and I do say "more or less": I left Sants station a quarter of an hour late and Lleida-Pirineus station twenty-five minutes late. Given the shameful state of the Cercanías commuter rail, that's not much). Luckily, I finished what I had to do an hour ahead of schedule, so I was able to stroll for half an hour along a section of the Eix Comercial, which, at 3.5 uninterrupted kilometers, is one of the longest shopping streets in Europe. Aside from the inevitable memories the walk stirred—one's true home is one's childhood—I noticed that this network of streets had regained its vibrancy, the energy it once had.
When I was a child, in the late sixties and early seventies, that area was teeming with commercial activity and life. There was a toy store, known as Lo Baratillo, with a strangely eye-catching, unusual facade, full of large inflatable balls and things like that (it would be good to have it restored, I think). My wife's maternal family had a shop almost opposite the Paeria (city hall). After that, everything gradually declined, until it almost hit rock bottom. Some genius decided to grant permission for a huge shopping center, financed by French capital, to open right in the middle of the city; the result was catastrophic. Later, the decline gave way to sheer decrepitude. Last Thursday, January 22, 2026, however, I noticed that most of the shops and restaurants were open again. They were a joy, and I was truly happy. Cities are born, they die, and, if we're lucky, they are reborn.
Sunday the 25th was also a magnificent morning in Barcelona; the afternoon turned sour. We were able to take our obligatory urban walk, this time from Gràcia to El Clot, passing right by the Sagrada Família. As you approach Gaudí's extraordinary temple, you perceive a distinctly anomalous urban landscape. Leaving aside the throngs of tourists, who at certain times of the year practically block your path, almost all the shops are designed for speeding. The piles of Mexican sombreros from a few years ago—not many years ago, it should be noted—have disappeared, but what's there now is no different from the gadget shops in any other tourist city. In any case, this is just the insignificant tip of a sinister iceberg that has transformed the city of Barcelona into a hysterical and absurdly expensive place. It expels many of its citizens to accommodate wealthy people from all over the world, who are then served by people also from all over the world (but from the poor world, in this case). We locals are just extras, and we're lucky if we even get that far. Those less fortunate have to go far away, searching for reasonable rents and restaurants that don't serve rotten, Maxim's-priced food.
We now turn to the old hypothesis of Martians surveying the scene from above, with the UFO window down so they can smoke (mentholated blond cigarettes, which Ganymede particularly enjoys). If they were to observe Lleida's commercial thoroughfare, where I strolled on Thursday, and the area around the Sagrada Família, where I walked on Sunday, they might conclude that these are two places where things are running smoothly. From above, certainly, everything looks quite similar. But the reality is quite different. As the ever-perceptive and reasoned Miquel Puig has argued, the monoculture of tourism is a ruinous business. Unlike other productive activities, and although it may seem otherwise, in our context, tourism generates more losses than gains at a collective level. And this isn't the worst of it. It can disrupt and damage what is most valuable in a city: its social fabric. Right now, in Catalonia, there are cities that are moving forward, others that have stagnated, and still others that are floundering in a contradictory, gilded decadence, where nothing is as it seems. This is the case of Barcelona, the city where I have lived for forty-three years and which I love deeply. Some urban declines can be visually striking, while others are utterly unappealing. Watching how tourist pressure transforms one of the most attractive cities in the world into a hostile place is not at all amusing. Not at all. We are not talking about a minor incident, but a very serious dysfunction that has national, not just municipal, implications.