"Before the war, El Carmelo and El Guinardó were made up of towers and ground-floor houses: they were still a place of retreat for some advantaged merchants of the Barcelona middle class, false peacocks whose traces can still be seen today in some old chalet or ruined garden. But they left. Who knows if, upon seeing the refugees of the 1940s arrive, panting like shipwrecked people, their skin burned not only by the merciless sun of a lost war, but also by a lifetime of failures, they finally became aware of the national shipwreck, of the island flooded forever, of the lost paradise that this Mount Carmel was going to be in the immediate years"
Últimas tardes con Teresa, Juan Marsé (1966)
At the summit of Marsé's asphalted serpent —the Carmel road— the Delicias remains standing and intensely active, with its terrace invariably overflowing and with queues stretching neatly to the opposite sidewalk. "It's a source of pride to appear in the novel," they emphasize from behind the bar, where no one remains from the time when Pijoaparte played cards at those tables. We leave the bar behind to climb through Carmel, with houses practically hanging over the mountainside, with narrow, dizzying staircases leading to swarms of flats. Below the misnamed Carmel bunkers —in reality, the Can Baró anti-aircraft batteries—, the Mühlberg suspension bridge spans the precipice generated by the mining activity that marked the neighborhood. Sitting on its railing more than 100 meters above the ground, an unconscious person smokes a cigarette. In the silence of the hill, the one who could well be Pijoaparte hears the shutter click as the camera fires and suddenly turns; far from being bothered, he readjusts himself, stands before the abyss, and takes another puff.