The urban frame of, perhaps, the most outstanding novel of the last Princess of Asturias award, The city of prodigiesexplains the transformation of a city of provinces into a cosmopolitan city. It also investigates the misgivings between Madrid and Barcelona and at the origin of contempt, I hate even towards the Bourbons of much of the Barcelona citizenship. All that can tell a city park.
“On the eve of the inauguration of the Universal Exhibition, the authorities had pledged to clean Barcelona of undesirable.” That same phrase, which Mendoza places in 1888, shortly before the inauguration of the first universal exhibition that was held in his city – and in Spain -, he was heard again several times in the city. Not by chance, it happened during the preparations for another great event that should transform the metropolis: the 1992 Olympics. On that occasion, the transvestites with which we lived at night in the Rambla de Cataluña and the prostitutes, of minor alcurnia and lower budget than those of Pedralbes, who worked at the end of the Ramblas, were evicted.
We have known that it costs years to pay the cost of some Olympics. Especially when one of the national sports is to throw the house out the window to make power demonstrations. In the preparation of the second universal exhibition that hosted, again Barcelona, in 1929, Mendoza says that “every two hours as water was required as the one consumed throughout Barcelona in a whole day.” For this second universal Barcelona exhibition – the second in Spain and in the same city – the city made a Greek theater (El Grec), a Spanish people (with traditional constructions from several Spanish provinces) and … one of the most modern buildings in the world: the German pavilion, today rebuilt and known by the name of its author: Mies van der Rohe. “Everything at once,” he writes.
But, for Mendoza, perhaps, the most striking of that universal exhibition was the light supplier, “the source in a grump of the Montjuich mountain, a 50 -meter diameter pond and 3,200 cubic meters of capacity surrounded by suppliers that moved 3,000 liters of water operated by five pumps of 1,175 horses and lights and lighting by 1,300 kilowatts of electric energy. color.
Barcelona drowned in the nineteenth century. The main problem was … housing. Its price was in the clouds because the city lived arrested by the old Roman wall. If Paris had 7,802 hectares and London of 31,685, the Barcelona lived in 427. Mendoza says that if the density of Paris was 291 inhabitants per km2 and that of London of 128, in Barcelona lived 700 people in that space Power, ”he writes. Where did that suspicion that seem so current? Mendoza rooted him in his prodigious novel.
“In 1701 Catalonia, jealous of his freedoms, who saw threatened, embraced the cause of the Austrian archduke in the war of succession. He defeated that side, and enthroned the house of Bourbon in Spain, Catalonia was punished.” Bourbon armies ransacked Catalonia. “It was with the collusion of local controls,” clarifies the Cervantes Award. What was the looting?
There were hundreds of executions “for escarnio and lesson, their heads were skewered in spikes and exhibited at the busiest points of the Principality. Many cultivation fields were razed and sown with salt to return the sterile earth; the fruit trees were torn off at the root.” The cattle were tried to exterminate, especially the Pyrenean cow. Some fled to the mountains. The castles were demolished and their ashlars used to fence some populations. The monuments of the squares and walks were crushed, reduced to dust. The University of Barcelona was closed. The port was sown with sharks brought from the Antilles. “Maybe the Catalans are not enough for this lesson, said Felipe V.” That enlightened monarch, Duke of Anjou, had a gigantic fortification built in Barcelona. In the citadel lived an army of occupation lent to quelling any uprising. There the prisoners of sedition were hanged and left for vulture grass. But … “Inactive military is always a danger: they do not bore, do not ascend and last too much.” Paradoxes of life: prisoners of duty and hate, the military lived in their citadel.
In 1848 there was a popular uprising. Espartero considered more expeditious to bombard Barcelona from the Montjuic hill and the city recovered the land of the citadel. The city of prodigies tells how, to locate the 1888 exhibition, there was a public park. Today the Catalan Parliament meets there. The park is a symbol. Also an emblem. It represents a historical erase and also a rectification. Likewise, – the writer spares criticism – speaks of “rickets, of conception that often characterizes our local administration.” There is no forest or large groves. There is past, history, explanations. And, paradoxes of life, remains of the first Spanish universal exhibition that Barcelona transformed into The city of prodigies.