I remember that a few years ago, a good friend from a small town barely thirty kilometers from Barcelona, when proposing a plan in his village and seeing my instantaneous face of fatigue, blurted out: "How you Barcelonans are! They propose you go to the corner and it seems like you have to climb Everest!" And, at least in my case, he was right. Mea culpa.
But let it be known that this tendency towards low mobility that certain specimens of homo barceloninus can demonstrate is not only expressed outside the Cap i Casal. Internal mobility also seems to become a mountain for us, and that's never better said when we talk about Montjuïc.
This week we dedicated the Moments Estel·lars that The New Barcelona Post organizes at Casa Seat, to Montjuïc, the mountain of museums. And the amendment to the title came in the first question, from one of the three guests to the conversation, Marko Daniel, director of the Joan Miró Foundation, who, by the way, was endorsed by the other two protagonists, Isabel Salgado, director of the exhibitions and collection area of the La Caixa Foundation, and Pepe Serra, director of the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC).
Marko, affable yet forceful, warned that for him it was important to make it clear from the outset that Montjuïc is a park, not a mountain that, well looked at, at most, could be called a rock or a small rock. And everyone nodded, especially when he explained why it is important to keep in mind that Montjuïc is a "three-dimensional" park, with some elevation, but not much more than any other park.
The psychological factor of Barcelonans justifies this crucial note. Because it is true that often there is also the feeling that Montjuïc and everything it houses is far away. We talk about a mountain and we already imagine the Argentine Aconcagua. And no. From the perspective of the big cities with which we usually want to compare ourselves, Montjuïc is central, in distance. But above all, it is necessary to make it central in our minds.
A central space, yes, open and with nature (partly why Joan Miró decided to locate his foundation there). And this complementarity between nature and culture, Isabel Salgado also wanted to highlight it along with the large number and variety of cultural facilities found there. A great content that even raises the question of whether it can be projected in a sufficiently coherent and powerful way, an objective that Pepe Serra, director of the MNAC, believes we are now closer to achieving.
The transformation of Fira, now yes (it was "now or never", according to Serra), can offer an opportunity for the MNAC and the rest, with the horizon of 2029, when a resounding centenary will be celebrated for the park that, in the style of Prince, we could also describe as "the artist formerly known as mountain". It is a great opportunity to structure a circuit. To narrow distances between the inhabitants of the space and between them and those of the rest of the city. In short, it can be a great excuse for things to work better in Montjuïc, starting with the relationship of all Barcelonans with it.