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it has happened to all of us at some point, often when strolling unhurriedly: suddenly we have come across an unknown detour, we have found a doorway that seems to hide an alley, and, faced with the promise of a new journey, we have altered our route and given it a chance. And upon entering one of these passages, we have rediscovered that feeling of discovery and adventure, because we don't know where that alley will lead us, or if it is public or private, or if that secret passage will end in a dead end or a shortcut.
If the detour ends in a dead end, we will retrace our steps, disappointed but happy to have discovered a secret place, a small corner of the city for the enjoyment of the community that lives there, the owners of a small private oasis where children can play with the freedom of the squares of yesteryear.
And if the passage we have taken spontaneously has an exit, we will become complicit passers-by and incorporate this shortcut into our usual routes. Little by little, we will discover what kind of families live there and, from then on, whenever we pass by, we will remember the uncertainty of the day of discovery.
According to the dictionary, a passage is a "short street, a gallery between two streets, reserved for pedestrians." This definition coincides with one of those given by Jorge Carrión, one of our foremost experts on this type of thoroughfare, who traversed dozens while writing Barcelona: Llibre dels passatges. "In every passage there is the affirmation or negation of the entire city," he asserts: if the city is pedestrians and cars, speed and traffic, chaos and hustle, the passage would be the opposite, a space that ignores the present and becomes a bubble where time stands still.
In Barcelona, we have some European-style passages, so beautiful you could spend hours in them, mesmerized by the stained glass and friezes. The Passatge de la Pau, at the end of Las Ramblas, would be a scaled-down example, much less lavish, of course, than the Parisian galleries or the Vittorio Emanuele in Milan. But we also have the other side of the coin, the industrial passages. These are those alleyways in the textile neighborhoods – in Vallès we called them estades – that housed dozens of rooms on both sides of the path and where entire families lived, often in subhuman conditions, in those decades when we resembled Calcutta more than Paris.
In fact, we could reconstruct the history of Barcelona through its passages. From these alleyways – some remain in Poblenou – to the passages of towers for the summering of the Barcelona bourgeoisie that are still maintained in Farró, in the heart of Sant Gervasi, like the Mulet passage or the Sant Felip passage, which is locked every night so that residents can sleep peacefully. In a house with the same jasmine scent, a few streets up, Mercè Rodoreda grew up.
But there's more: the passages of the Chinese quarter, like the Bernardí Martorell, still evoke the darkness, the urine, and the condoms of decades ago, when the neighborhood's rubber houses advertised with slogans like "spend a real and save a thousand." Away from the center, we have passages that explain the shantytowns and self-construction of Carmel or Ciutat Meridiana, still unpaved, and finally, if we return to the core, we have the passages next to the Palau de la Música, like Sert or Manufactures, which in a way explain the Barcelona of the future: with vegan restaurants, hipster cafes, coworking spaces, and floods of tourists.