La Colonia Barcelona

The Dentist Wants to Know

Every time a bombing, a demonstration, or some novel form of atrocity interrupts the peace of a European city, the flow of American tourists dries up. The US State Department issues a scary advisory, and the American media arrive by the truckload to flood the airwaves with dire descriptions of the mayhem that awaits you there. Covid-19 took this brand of hysteria to a whole new level and turned off the tourist taps for more than a year.

Some cities “suffer” the effects more than others. Trendy magnets like Venice, Athens, Prague, or Barcelona suddenly wax livable, with high-season weather and low-season crowds. The locals forget the irritants of the tourist trade and warm up to the few strangers who still show up to finance their business.

But it never lasts, so you have to get it while you can.

Columbus points. No one knows exactly where.

One of the funniest travel stories we’ve seen occurred, of all places, in a New England Travel Group on Facebook. In a political stunt, the Governor of Florida had just flown 40 Venezuelan immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard. A wary tourist posted that she didn’t know much about Venezuelans, but was it still safe to travel to the Vineyard?

Needless to say, the crusty New Englanders in the group unloaded on the poor woman. But we used to see posts nearly as timid as hers every day in the French and Italian travel groups. Such questions would engender long and sober discussions with self-styled experts and references to this or that anecdote and the latest timorous US State Department notice. A (presumably intrepid) visitor from Mars might justifiably conclude that American travelers had entirely lost their nerve.

Not everyone loves your tourist (or Spanish) euro.

What does this have to do with Barcelona?

Compared to that FB poster, we’d probably qualify as fearless. We’ve wandered the streets of Casablanca, Old Delhi, New York, London, and Istanbul at all hours, taken buses through the West Bank within weeks of the last Intifada, and boarded packed midnight trains at Mumbai’s CST station. We’ve landed alone at night on a tiny volcanic island with no moon or street lights to guide us to a supposed reservation. We’ve lost each other in the ghastly alleyways of the Saint-Denis red light district of Paris, and accidentally wandered into a scary, torchlit Mexico City demonstration.

The way we thought we were.

But the only place in all of our travels where we’ve actually been mugged is Barcelona—and that happened twice in one year.

The second time, it was the standard cell phone cliche. Never leave your phone on the bar, and if a drunk old geezer stumbles into you, immediately check your pockets. Fortunately, Apple supplies a nuclear option, so within minutes, the old thief was sauntering about town with a useless rock. The incident engendered all kinds of mental self-kicks-in-the-butt, but the fact was, it barely qualified as a mugging.

La Boqueria—fire in the belly, fire in the soul?

The first time was more serious. We were driving into town on the ring road with Belgian plates on a rental car. Two young men on a scooter knifed our right rear tire, then tried to maneuver us off into a dark side street. Instead, we plowed to a stop on the avenue’s broad, reasonably well lit sidewalk. The thieves still rushed up and tried our doors and trunk, but fortunately, we’d locked up. Then an old man came roaring out of a nearby townhouse and chased them off with his cane.

La Boqueria—spice in the belly, spice in the soul?

Barcelona is no more dangerous than any modern metropolis and certainly safer than London, New York, or Paris. But if this city gave us pause, it might have been because of the research we’d done into the Catalan capital’s long and thorough addiction to political violence.

Catalonia has been revolting against the Spanish central government from the day in 1137 when the two were joined under the Crown of Aragon. But it was the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) that scarred the city forever. Stalinists, Trotskyists, Anarchists, Trade Unionists, Republicans, Catholics, Protestants, Fascists, Nationalists, and downright lunatics all owned their corners of the Iberian Peninsula, but in Barcelona, they threw in together in one vast, ugly brawl. And the goal in that fracas wasn’t to beat your opponents senseless—it was to exterminate them. The half-million dead (with 200,000 straight executions) made the American Wild West read like a bedtime story.

Las Ramblas—flowers and gossip on New Year’s Day.

The Catalan language and independence movement somehow survived that fracas and 37 dreary years of suppression at the hands of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Today, like the Basques, the Catalans seem to have given up on bombs and bullets in favor of the occasional bloodless demonstration, a string of quickly ignored plebiscites, and a penchant for clever graffiti. At least, we hope so.

Tourism never hurts, of course—when everyone’s too busy cashing in on the showy good vibes, who has time for a riot? And in Barcelona, those vibes start early and run late at night in a town filled with young people, both Catalan and foreign, with money to burn. Just hold onto your cell phone when you venture into the darker passages and alleys where all the best celebrations are found.

Support your local busker and buy his CD.

So why do we still come to Barcelona?

For the food of course (there we go again!). Even with Franco despising the city’s politics, prosperity took off from the Civil War onward and brought a massive influx of Spanish workers and their culinary talents. Valencians brought Paella, Castilians brought Tapas. Latin Americans and Asians arrived with their distinctive kitchen accents. And we brought the appetites!

Odd as it might seem, and in spite of our two incidents, we’ve actually been rather well treated by the Barcelonans. On New Year’s Day, at the swank 7 Portes in the harbor, the Maitre D’ announced to the lines at the door that the restaurant was completely full. Then, as the crowds dispersed, he nodded at our mute inquiry and discreetly ushered us in to his best table. At an anonymous neighborhood Tapas bar, the owner’s daughter and a crowd of her friends grinned at our broken Catalan and took over the ordering of a fabulous meal. When that old geezer made off with our cell phone, the bar emptied into the street looking for him (and that bar, by the way, served up the best martini in Europe!).

If you travel regularly to the Continent and aren’t made of money, it’s hard to avoid Barcelona with its inexpensive airfares and forgiving immigration officers. And as long as you’ve come that far, it makes no sense to simply fly onward and miss one the most fun and exciting cities on the planet. Whatever our whiny complaints, we certainly never do.

Colony or conqueror?

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Here are two wonderful, if obscure, movies that drew us to Barcelona in the first place:

We’re just better shots:

What you expect your life to be in five years:

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But (if you have a morbid a sense of humor like ours) the Dentist, Doctor Zell, still wants to know…

Is it safe?