Barcelona (Travel with a Writer)

“Gaudí didn’t foresee that the area around his temple would become an open-air market for selfie sticks and dancing SpongeBobs.”

Barcelona is a city that has learned, for better and for worse, how to be seen. Once defined by its own rhythms, it now evolves under constant observation and patronage by visitors from around the world—to the perpetual chagrin of Barcelonians. 

Anna Pazos is a Barcelonian, no two ways about it. The tourist industry has always shaped her life, from an innate skepticism toward the city’s landmarks to a stint working as a hostess at one of them. But her cranky inner critic is tempered with a deep well of affection for the place where she grew up, an appreciation of the way the twists and turns of its rich history have only made it more expansively itself, and a will to see it through the reverent eyes of the newcomer.

Candid and urbane, Barcelona is a guide to how centuries of upheaval—empires and epidemics and wars, fascist dictatorship and linguistic schism, Art Nouveau and the 1992 Olympics—have shaped the present of a city that is at once majestic and garish and irrepressibly alive.

Translated from the Catalan by Paul Sánchez Keighley

Part of Travel with a Writer, The Walking Tree's global literary travel series pairing acclaimed writers with the cities and places they know intimately. Combining literary essays and fiction, original infographics, curated walks, and beautiful design, each volume is a literary companion to place, designed to be read in a single sitting. Together, the series forms a growing literary atlas of the world.