Gaudi’s fantastic city

My introduction to Barcelona was ironically through a French film. I saw L’Auberge Espanol (the Spanish hostel) back in 2003, in which the hero, a French student shares a big apartment with a motley European crew. My two impressions were of multiculturalism and Gaudi, from scenes set at what I later identified as Parc Guell and the Sagrada Familia.

The name Gaudi was soon attached to any mention of Barcelona. Architect Antoni Gaudi was the creator of fantastic buildings. How or why they were fantastic I had no idea. Was there anything else to Barcelona? Good tapas, I assumed. Paella too. Sunshine, I hoped, coming as I was from cold Paris. Beyond that, there were some rumblings of a Gothic Quarter. A beach.

My Airbnb host marked out all of these on the Barcelona map. The two I immediately noted were the Gaudi buildings on the Passeig de Gracia — Casa Milà and Casa Batló. Passeig de Gracia is to Barcelona what the Champs Elysees is to Paris — a main avenue populated by luxury stores. There’s even an Arc de Triomf at one end. But unlike the almost completely commercial Champs Elysees, Passeig de Gracia is lined with Modernist buildings. This Modernism extends right down to the earring style street lights and mosaic benches.

Gaudi’s work is unmissable. Amidst the pastel prettiness, his buildings are in equal parts repellent and fascinating. His Modernism embraces the natural and organic, pretty, he leaves for mere mortals. So there are bony pillars and skull-ish balconies, tree pillars and lizard fountains, onion domes and scaly roofs both for ornamentation and engineering. Gaudi combines these with all the influences of this Catalonian city — the Goths, the Moors and the reigning Art Nouveau movement of the late 19th century.

On the Passeig de Gracia is Casa Batló whose pillars gave it the moniker Bones House. It’s almost no surprise that the square on which Casa Batló is located is called square of Discordia. Further ahead, Casa Milà’s local name is La Pedrera (the quarry) because of its undulating grey stone front. Topping its roof are chimney pots designed like medieval sentries or if you’re a Star Wars fan, stormtroopers.

His most famous building though is a little further away. The Sagrada Familia, to which he dedicated the last years of his life — so massive an undertaking that it’s still 10 years from completion — whose soaring ceilings are held up by a forest of trees, branching out in support. Inside are stained glass windows, cool for morning light on the East and warm for the evening in the West. Pristine white gothic staircases lead up to the choir. The pinnacle of his achievement, it’s incredibly moving inside, equally hideous out. But while Gaudi may be Barcelona’s most famous son, the city has far more to offer. Dating to Roman times, it has been home to Visigoths and Moors and its Gothic quarter built in the 14th and 15th century on the remains of Roman settlements gives you a glimpse of the many influences.

Shafts of sunlight breaking in through the buildings lead you along the narrow streets of the Gothic Quarter, where souvenir shops stand cheek by jowl with cafes (Satan’s Coffee Corner for the best coffee), tapas bars (La Alcoba Azul served two of my best meals in years), and open into squares. The grandest square is the Plaça Reial lined with restaurants, tables spilling out from the arcades to the square itself, a huge fountain in the middle. There is also the Plaça de la Seu at the start of the quarter where street artists surprise you with a variety of performances. Here, also, stands the Cathedral dedicated to Saint Eulalia. Its dim interiors open out onto cloisters that remind you of Mumbai. A lift takes you up to the terrace where church spires rise in front of you and red shingled roofs give way to futuristic towers. It holds centuries of Barcelona in the blink of an eye.

Nishat Fatima is a photographer and journalist currently based in Paris. She is also the author of Seriously, Sitara?

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