An initial warning: over the last 25 years, I've lived in New York, Rome, Jerusalem, Paris, Buenos Aires, and Madrid. And, at times, in Barcelona, where I had a home that I no longer have. I am, therefore, a Barcelona native passing through. Due to my age, I am also a long-standing Barcelona native, born and educated in an industrial, disorderly, and rebellious city, alien to the Olympics and postmodernism. If I may say so, I don't like palm trees, fairs, or conferences.
At the beginning of this century, I was surprised by the bustle of suitcases on the streets of Barcelona. The city center reminded me of a hotel lobby: people coming and going, loaded down with luggage. It's just a tourist thing. My foreign friends spoke wonders about Barcelona, and what could I say? Yes, there was a beach, the food was good, Gaudí, Modernism.
Why tell you that I thought La Pedrera was beautiful when part of its facade was covered with a bingo sign? An aberration, I know. An aberration that showed, in any case, that we Barcelonans were preoccupied with more important things than the facades' complexion: there were still no clients waiting in the lounge.
Now, in 2025, I still think about a hotel every time I'm in Barcelona. But not because of the abundance of tourists and suitcases, but because of the bustle of the inhabitants. Very few of my friends from Barcelona still live in Barcelona. Oh, the prices. The faces of the urban landscape are different.
I'm not talking, of course, about the "great substitution" invoked by the far right to prophesy a future in which we'll walk around in djellabas, but rather about a generalized demographic transfusion: the apartment that belonged to my aunt Juanita (as an example) is now home to a successful Norwegian computer scientist; my aunt Pepita's apartment is home to a friendly Ecuadorian family; and my friend Jordi's apartment is home to a gentleman from Lleida who made his fortune with several restaurants. I suspect that almost all the other apartments are rented out by the day to tourists.
That's why I refer to it as a hotel. Because the population is (as in other cities that are gentrifying and subject to tourism, but at a faster rate) mobile and ephemeral. Because the more or less permanent residents tend to take refuge in their little corner and only use the common areas in cases of imperative need: as that great master of baseball and paradox, Yogi Berra, said, no one goes to certain neighborhoods or certain Ramblas anymore because there are too many people. And because the sense of heritage that characterized Barcelona residents has been fading: the city still belongs to someone, I suppose, but many of us don't feel it's ours.
Allow me another note of bad taste: the last time I recognized Barcelona in Barcelona was October 18, 2019. I'm referring to Urquinaona. That outburst of fury, that clash of contradictions between the city, the region, and a distant power, that adolescent and nihilistic fury, that police rage so historically typical in what was called the Rose of Fire, seemed to me an effective argument against the "cofoisme" from the managers of the city-hotel. And a reminder that there are alternatives to melancholic hedonism.
I don't feel capable of commenting on whether Barcelona is in decline. It depends on your point of view, what you compare it to, what past you remember, and where you want to go (if you want to go anywhere). Barcelona, posa't guapa, they said. For whom? And, above all, for what?
