The hotter the heatwave gets, the more I stumble through Barcelona with the lady with the umbrella. Nothing to do with the elegant modernist statue in Parc de la Ciutadella, which delicately extends a hand to check if it's still raining. The one I usually find is an Asian woman who has decided to protect her white skin from the sun and who walks along the Eixample pavements towards some Gaudí building with an outfit often reinforced with a cap and sunglasses. You feel like asking her for a corner of her umbrella, like in Brassens' song. The umbrella trend has more followers with each passing day, but, curiously, I haven't seen any men carrying one.
The heat causes its moment of local pride, when I see the faces of foreign families with children when they enter the metro carriages and, for a moment, they sigh when they feel the salvific effects of the air conditioning on their backs. Yes, being a Southern European country had to have some advantage, unlike in London (and with that woolly carpet), where they only have air conditioning on four out of eleven metro lines. A friend who lives there tells me that we don't know what public transport we have in Barcelona, compared to the English capital (in Washington it was the same), where the metro is full of signs saying to carry water and that if you feel dizzy from the heat, inform station staff. And for Sant Jordi, a lot of criticism of tree pollen, but these days there's some luck with the shade they provide.
Are we prepared for the heat? It varies by neighborhood, and never more so than now. But after the experience of these days, it's better that we move from protection and defense measures to de-escalating summer economic activity, because visiting Barcelona on days like these can only be for those who think they will never return and that, for the one time they visit, they must make the most of it.
