When a foreigner asks you how you would define Barcelona, immediately – something that happens with any interlocutor in the world who praises their city – the adjective "beautiful" emerges from your lips. Afterwards, precisely because you know that everyone loves the place where they were born (even if it's as ugly as Zaragoza or Omaha), you clarify that Barcelona is beautiful in a very particular, orderly, and modest way. You verbally immobilize the interlocutor in question, telling them about the syntax of the Eixample, a perfect mixture between the Greek ideal of noucentisme and the trencadís modernista, and this somewhat kitschy ceramic pastiche serves to explain how, even when we flood objects with color, we weave it with geometry in mind. You affirm that Barcelona is beautiful, above all because it is peaceful, as walking around you always stumble upon an interesting shop, a tree, and a fellow citizen. Also because, generally, this is a free city, where people don't meddle in your affairs and let others do as they please.
All of this is changing. Our city was, in effect, a perfect sum of prosperity and comfort. We never had nor will we ever have the cultural power of New York or London, but we could momentarily approach these cities and, in turn, play the card of living in a much more human landscape than those growth-crazed metropolises. But now, Barcelona is becoming exponentially more expensive (which does not align with neighborhood salaries) and, to top it off, it has ceased to be a place for leisurely strolls. To make matters worse, lately the city seems to enjoy ugliness: this has been seen in my nearby Plaça de Sant Jaume, where the country's administrations have competed to see who can smear the place the most in an outrageously vulgar competition. First, there's this tacky nativity scene that Jaume Collboni has decided to continue perpetrating, and then the brilliant idea of the Govern to stain the Generalitat's portal with Christmas tags.
I would love to have witnessed the meetings in which one of our politicians had the brilliant idea of setting up a nativity scene based on horrible little postcards or of turning one of Europe's oldest seats of power into the door of a refrigerator overflowing with Christmas ornaments. I would be passionate, seriously, to know who or how one can come to the conclusion that dirtying our squares and our most stately buildings with these Easter monkeys is a good idea. Because if the political intelligence of our leaders is equal to their aesthetic sensibility, we should start praying to be transferred for work to a small town in Alaska, as happened to our admired Doctor Joel Fleischman. I have never been a lover of light decoration, but in towns, people usually have the decency to make the strings of lights coincide with the outline of the most emblematic buildings; not like on my street, where the lighting has been installed weaving triangles that criminally destroy its figure.
I would be passionate, seriously, to know who or how one can come to the conclusion that dirtying our squares and our most stately buildings with these Easter monkeys is a good ideaGoing against my liberal and anti-punitive nature, I propose to my fellow citizens that we unite to establish a crime that should be much more exemplary than tax penalties, environmental penalties, or even sedition. A crime of aesthetic ugliness should be established, because to defile the landscape of a city in such a kitschy way should entail, at least, a few days in the slammer. In fact, we would have to expand our already sufficiently packed prisons to house the authors of most shop windows, promotional posters, and other nonsense that defile the facades of Barcelona. If these offenses were committed in the name of the competent authority, as is the case with the appalling display of Plaça de Sant Jaume, to the penitentiary one would have to add a compensatory fine: because the horrible junk in question costs us a lot of money. Something must be done urgently so that visitors to the city do not believe that we share the bad taste of our leaders.
Decades ago, we sang "Barcelona, get pretty!"; now we should be a little more modest and, in line with the aesthetic crisis of our time, compulsively repeat "Barcelona, don't get so ugly!".