Barcelona

After the Spanish experience in May, we decided to return to Spain for the summer holidays, above all because this year Barcelona was hosting the Olympics, and hockey is an Olympic sport. Besides Barcelona, we also spent a few days at the seaside. The second city of Spain but the foremost centre of Catalonia, Barcelona is a metropolis facing the sea with many contrasting souls. The Catalan soul is the most pronounced, making it a city jealous of its own culture and age-old traditions, so proud of its language as to make it survive the Francoist oblivion. Cosmopolitan Barcelona, on the other hand, has always been open to foreign trends, which arrived thanks to a very busy port and the proximity of national borders and were interpreted here in an original way.

Culturally vibrant and the driving force behind dizzying economic progress, the Catalan capital is also the concrete expression of a constant desire for renewal, whether driven by civic needs (as in the case of the Eixample) or structural ones (see the works for the 1992 Olympics). The tourist who reaches it discovers a city both ancient and modern, where the finest examples of Catalan Gothic sit alongside spectacular expressions of Modernisme and where the juxtaposition of an old fishermen's quarter and a modern Olympic city doesn't seem all that irreverent. Its architectural beauties and artistic masterpieces — together with tasty cuisine and some of the liveliest nightlife — make Barcelona one of the favourite destinations of travellers reaching Spain.