Tear Down the Wall (1714 - 1905)

In the medieval era, cities were walled cities. They are cities in constant conflict. Sometimes, they even have a double wall, the more traditional, from the Roman age, and a second, stronger one, from the medieval. What was its purpose? It created cities with a strong defense, with gated entrances into the city, and greater control of comings and goings, but also profound overcrowding. The overpopulation is incredible, a brutal population density, to the detriment of air quality, hygiene. As stated, poor health on top of all these [other] factors. For a while, all this is managable. The Raval was outside the city walls. On the right side, from Las Ramblas down, was the area beyond the walls. When war came, people entered the city. When it ended, they left. There was constant rebuilding. War would sometimes destroy and present the need to rebuild the neighborhoods on the outside. That’s a reality in Barcelona, Girona, all the walled cities.Until the nature of how war is waged changes. Armaments become so sophisticated that a wall, in a way, is no longer sufficient. We need to consider that, on many occassions, bomb attacks were undertaken, with limited explosions, primarily for impact. They were solid masses slamming the wall until they crumbled. Later came the explosive bombs, but they were of limited importance.There’s a moment at the turn of the century when munitions are greatly modernized, which makes…First, there’s no open war with the great rival, France, nor wars between Catalunya and Castilla. It’s all over. The wall’s is then seen as something that constricts the city. It’s a corset, closed tight, and so begins the “Abajo las murallas” [tear down the walls] campaign, a sort of regenerationist campaign. This gets underway in 1860 and progresses forward.

The Floral Games are an old tradition in Catalonia. It is basically a poetry competition. It’s a literature contest, typically focused on poetry. It is organized at a neighborhood level, at a small-town level, and at a city level. I wrote poetry as a child to enter the Floral Games. It was a great honor for me to enter a poem in the Jocs Florals. It was done in my school, in my neighborhood It’s a beautiful tradition and I remember my mom and I, on a typewriter, long before computers existed. We’d write a poem on the typewriter, and we’d photocopy it in order to enter it in the Floral Games. The winner was awarded a book and a flower. So you can see, it wasn’t that big of a deal. When I was 9 years old, I won the floral games in my neighborhood, and it felt like winning an Oscar. It was a very sweet and beautiful thing. Luckily, the tradition is still alive. And now, around Sant Jordi, between April and May…with Sant Jordi on one side [in April] and Barcelona’s poetry week on the other, celebrated in May. So, Floral Games are still celebrated. It’s a beautiful tradition that encourages writing and reading.

A lot of people who had started the industrial revolution in the Maresme, the Llobregat and Reus came to live in Barcelona. And all that people, right when the walls were breached, and there was an event, organized mainly by a great mayor, Rius y Taulet, to open up the city. And the ‘Ronda Sant Pere’ was made, which is the first street where started to live the people that start to create the industry in this first phase of the industrial revolution. Which is a much more interesting phase than the second one, so it was through small workshops. After the Napoleonic invasion, there was a grapevine illness, an important phylloxera, and that ended the wine business, which was dominant in the great landowners in the areas of Vic, Besalúc, all that area, Olot, etc. Then all that people started trading with silk worms, this isn’t told in history books but I’ve seen it in the family archives. The silk worms were to build silken sails for ships, because the Borbons allowed the Catalans to trade with America. Then the ships that came out of the Maresme or Tarragona had silken sails. The small workshops started producing silk and then cotton. Cotton in Llobregat why? Because it’s a river that can move the turbines because it’s a river that goes down. The textile industry in Spain was before in Madrid, Sevilla, Valladolid, but from the Llobregat and those turbines, imported from England, they started to generate electricity and to adapt the cotton industry to new technologies, with which Catalans got the lead in cotton. Then came wool, mines, etc.

For example, things I remember…About the family. My grandfather, for example, on my mother’s side, came from a village with a cart, because they were from Valls. They lived in Vallmoll.And they came with a cart. They were immigrants inside Catalonia itself. Because you just couldn’t live there. He came here and settled in the neighborhood of Horta with his goats. He died from a heart attack after a train ran over some of his goats. He thought his partner had been run over by the train too, and died at the age of 32.

It’s very old. It’s a Romance language that comes from Latin. They are all Romance languages: Catalan, Spanish, French, Galician. Not Basque, though. It’s different. But Catalan is a Romance language. Depending on the settlers, whether they were Iberians or Phoenicians, they adopted one accent or another. All Romance languages came from Vulgar Latin, and so they adopted pronounced characteristics of many languages. Each region has words from other languages. Valencia, for instance, has many Arabic words because they settled the land during a long period. Catalan from here doesn’t have as many Arabic words. Andalusia, and other places, use a lot of words that come from Arab. We have from other origins. Of Basque origin, for example: pissarra [blackboard]. And from English as well. They are neologisms. Even though my Catalan feeling, I believe Spanish is very beautiful. I’ve studied it, and I find it stunning, but it’s not my language. Well, I’m lying. I’ve both spoken and studied it a lot because of bilingualism. It’s a nice language, but it’s not mine.

If we take a look at a map form Barcelona, the center of Barcelona, the old medieval town with its two walls was surrounded by a series of small villages. In addition, curiously when the citadel is constructed after the succession war, in order to control the city and the citizenry, what they do is forbid building around the city walls the distance a cannonball flies. So, that means that all these towns that are around Barcelona are just that distance away. And that’s the area that will later be occupied by the Eixample when this ban is lifted. So Barcelona is united with this small villages, which have their own character. Gràcia, Sants, Sarrià, Sant Martí, Hostafrancs, Sants. That’s quite recent, so I suppose that they still keep their own identity. Actually, the only neighborhood that didn’t have identity was the ‘Eixample’, because it was new.