In Barcelona, it has been two intense days. The poor Pope, after the Canary Islands excursion with the final failure of the broken plane (what a ridiculous, Iberia airline!), looked tired, and I thought he was limping a bit. But the job of a pope involves these things. In Spain, which was the excuse so that the papal visit was not solely Catalan and Gaudí-related, they did everything they could to make a good impression. The king and queen – the queen with the white privilege – and all the fuss of bishops and cardinals. In Catalonia, it was a bit different, because here we have a bit more good taste and know how to do things a bit better. In fact, the Catalan visit had two main stages: Montserrat and the Sagrada Família. What surprised me was that the Montserrat event consisted of praying the rosary. Such an unliturgical prayer! But Montserrat is no longer what it was, even though the choir offered a spectacle worthy of the abbey's best times, the glorious times of Abbot Escarré. The choir appeared full: bishops and cardinals and singers, instead of monks; because, of monks, there are fewer and fewer every day...

In the eighties of the last century, being naturally sociable and living in the US, I had a story to tell about where I came from. It included two observations about Barcelona that are shocking today. One was the ethnic homogeneity of the population. During a sabbatical in Barcelona in '81, an Indian student I was supervising for his doctoral thesis visited me. He was Sikh and, therefore, covered his head with a turban. When he went out on the street, people stared at him, and someone even asked him where he had gotten a bed of nails to sleep on. The other, which will be the focus of this article, was that, referring to the phenomenon of tourism in Catalonia, I noted that it extended along the entire Catalan coast except in Barcelona, where it was absent. Tourists avoided it with almost surgical precision.

Taking advantage of the attention generated about the Sagrada Família due to the Pope's visit this week, it has come to light that, until a few months ago, 70 of the tourist guides who taught about the temple were false self-employed. Last December, Labor Inspection forced the two companies responsible for the service to regularize the situation of the professionals, according to a statement from the Col·lectiu Ronda issued this Monday.

How many old photo albums lying around houses hold pictures taken on rooftops? Grandparents or parents would climb up there with those cameras that had limited technology (they were called "portrait machines"), searching for the light that was lacking in the apartment so the photo wouldn't come out dark, and a simple background that the street couldn't provide. I suppose they must have looked for their own horizon reference point in each location. In Barcelona, ​​it was clear: the Sagrada Família, with those first four bare towers of the Nativity façade on Sardenya Street, which were the image of the city for almost forty years. The image was so fixed that for many Barcelonans, those four spires were enough.