To Sant Andreu, it's worth arriving through Bon Pastor, an old area of land previously owned by bourgeois families who sold their respective tens of hectares surrounding the Besòs to pay for their children's ballet classes. Barcelona should also be viewed from this river park with views of Santaco and, further in the distance, Sant Adrià, a place where now there are only factories and industrial estates, the neighborhood market is a supremely ugly Lidl, and where the physiognomy of the place forces people to live cooped up at home, to perpetrate running on the banks of the smelly river, or to watch bad movies at La Maquinista. Some privileged mind could give new life to the maritime-style houses of Carrer de Arbeca and open up the neighborhood's horizon to a riverbank where a New York urban planner would have already invented a handful of tricks for hipsters. But intelligence is scarce in the city, and from living away from the sea, we have now turned our backs on our rivers.
The nullity of Bon Pastor is one of those urban voids that speaks for itself. Advancing along Paseo de L'Havana towards La Maquinista Park, I contemplate some not at all impoverished buildings, which could perfectly be confused with the standardized flats of the Vil·la Olímpica, but located in a neighborhood where, literally, it seems that nothing at all can be done. Appearances are deceiving when we come across the brick monstrosity of the Ignasi Iglesias-Can Fabra Library, located near the old Coats thread factory and managed by the Diputació (when institutions do something worthwhile, it must be said directly, and the Diputació's library network is highly responsible for many working-class people in many neighborhoods of the city having been able to commit the temerity of opening a book or, simply, studying in warmth). For comic book enthusiasts, the institution has the most important collection of copies of all the libraries in Barcelona.
On the upper floor of the Ignasi Iglésias, I meet a good writer friend who is looking for (and finds) a thousand-page tochaco novel, which, on a mid-August day, is a countercultural act that gives me some hope in this atrocious present we live in. With him, we comment that the Fabra i Coats, which is right next door and which the pretentious call "creation factory," is currently one of the most attractive cultural programming and agitation infrastructures in the city (that culture is born and enjoyed on the margins of Barcelona's great museum totems should make our cultural agents reflect, by the way). We recently walked among sordid enclaves and now we are in a public library talking about Kurt Vonnegut, about the artistic residencies of the Massana school and the Mixtur festival of contemporary music, all inside a restored original factory from 1903. Certainly, there is still hope.
I thought I was in the middle of nowhere (and it is true that there is an endemic lack of communication between the people who live in Bon Pastor and the entities I was just telling you about) but as a good Catalan, I breathe when I see a church, that of Sant Andreu de Palomar, a temple clumsily woven ---or with enough ugliness to have survived the bad temper of Al-Mansur, the riots that led to the War of the Reapers and the anarchists' desire to burn altars during the slaps of the Tragic Week---, of a poor ceramic pottery, prelude to the quiet and beautiful Plaza de Orfila. The boorish would say that this is a square that has the charm of a village, but you already know that this stabber of yours has attacks of bile when peace is necessarily equated with our tribe's love for the agrarian. This is a purely Barcelonian enclave, of course.
The boorish would say that this is a square that has the charm of a village, but you already know that this stabber of yours has attacks of bile when peace is necessarily equated with the love for the agrarianIt is a shame that most fellow citizens do not move their butts from their own neighborhood, because getting distracted on a sweltering morning like this on Gran de Sant Andreu street, one of the central thoroughfares of the neighborhood where small businesses served in Catalan still resist the enemy's onslaught, is an absolute delight. The natives of the neighborhood stroll from the Versalles bar towards Fabra i Puig, and it is the gradual degradation of the street that ends up forcing you to change your route (note for restaurateurs willing to take risks: Sant Andreu is crying out for a proper restaurant that overcomes the pandemic of soulless and graceless bars that populate it; chefs of the city, please set up something worthwhile and we will compensate you).From the neighborhood downtown it is worth escaping to Pons i Gallarza street, full of colored facades, where La Tribu, a bookstore for people who like to read, is hidden.
Turning around Vintró street, you will reach the old Mercat square, one of the centers of the neighborhood that has unfortunately fallen asleep due to remodeling works that accumulate more deadlines and delays than sovereignist roadmaps; the last municipal oath was to finish them in March 2021, and I roll the dice again. It is a real shame, because the small shops of the merchants that pepper this natural square with an Italianate air (I fondly remember, if my neuron doesn't fail me, the Perelló cod shop and the Tugas greengrocer) are a true marvel. From the market we can continue walking to Grau street, which is one of my favorite corners of Barcelona, a block that was born to host the sea and that has some baroque gardens with a kitsch spirit, among which there is a very curious miniature Catalonia that if you saw it in Berlin you would have an Instagram attack.
Leaving this last spot, in front of San Hipòlit street, I am surprised by a small miniature library in the shape of a birdcage crowned by a sign where the anarchists of the neighborhood have written a phrase attributed to Montserrat Roig: "Culture is the most revolutionary long-term political option." In another context, the naivety of our chronicler's sentence might have made me smile. But after this route from the apparent emptiness of Bon Pastor to the beautiful heart of Sant Andreu, I would say yes, that with a library you may not make a revolution, but one can experience encounters that make them overcome their prejudices.