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That the contemporary city is a space of collision is rarely perceived as clearly as in the Plaça dels Àngels: try to cross it without looking, and we'll see each other in the hospital. The original square, much smaller, dated back several centuries, but the enormous current esplanade, a very proud example of those socialist hard squares, inaugurated the nineties, when the Macba spaceship landed in the middle of the Raval. Since then, the Plaça dels Àngels has been associated with an aesthetic, yes, but above all with a sound: that of skateboards gliding over the cobblestones.
There are squares for Barcelonians, squares for pigeons, and squares for tourists: this one is for skateboarders. They arrive in the mid-morning -free spirits don't understand early mornings- and from then on you'll see them all day, between pirouettes, beers, and the dolce far niente of the dilettante, until the evening, the peak hour for seeing and being seen. Skating also doesn't understand seasons: it doesn't matter if it's winter and it's freezing cold, there will always be someone without a shirt, showing off their tattoos, and none of them will wear a helmet, which makes one look like an amateur. At most, some baldness-covering cap, for those innocent boys of the nineties who have grown older, and seeing grown-up skaters, who could have children and grandchildren, is no longer exceptional. There's always some kid starting, balancing on a side, but the best ones are recognized from afar, because they have a limpet friend stuck to their back, chasing them with a camera to record the jumps. Out of an entire afternoon spent on the ground, the recorder will save the two or three tricks with a happy ending, and this fragment will go straight to Instagram.
More or less every hour, the scene stops for a while, just long enough for the urban patrol to pass. They stand there for a few minutes, as if to intimidate, but as soon as their walkie-talkie calls them elsewhere, the skaters sense it and everything starts rolling again.
The diverse species coexist in harmony, with a tacit distribution of space: tourists occupy the terraces below the giant Chillida - "they kick us out of our home, the neighborhood does not resign itself" says a giant sign, while a few meters away, following Keith Haring's mural to Plaça Coromines, is where the freestyle community gathers, with hundreds of young people improvising verses on the Blanquerna stairs. Before, there was a large community of homeless people around here, and spectacular cricket matches of the Pakistani community had also been seen, but times change and that too has passed on to a better life.
Today, in Plaça dels Àngels there are only skaters, neighbors who dodge the skaters and the youth who watch everything sitting on the museum's bench, while the security guard goes crazy telling them not to get close to the door, that they could run over a visitor. Can sellers had been seen, but now they are not even needed: Joaquim Costa street supplies people with cheap beer and pizza slices.
At noon, students from the central campus approach, eating a tupper while sunbathing on the ramp, but they must always be careful not to sit in the middle of the walkway. "Before it was something else, with the native species still, but the invasive species is much more aggressive": that's what I've heard them discuss. The only beings immune to the roar of skateboards are the children of Escola Vedruna: with so many years of living with the noise, they naturally dodge this apple snail invader on wheels.