The skies have always drawn me in. When I moved to Barcelona, many people, on learning that I was from Madrid, would tell me the same thing: “Madrid has the most incredible skies!” And it’s true. Madrid has what I like to call “Antonio López skies”: clean, clear and sharply defined, just like the city itself. “Here I am, just as I am,” they seem to say. They put on their full display, leaving no one indifferent.
But as an attentive observer, I soon began to notice the sunsets. And I started to understand that Barcelona, too, has its own language when it comes to the canopy of sky above us. Here, the skies are more impressionistic: quick, fleeting brushstrokes, blurred strokes that never quite settle into place. Someone once tried to explain the phenomenon to me in terms of atmospheric conditions and particles suspended in the air. I wasn’t convinced. As with a work of art, I prefer to approach it first through the senses: that’s how something can truly move me.
These days, with all the rain and autumn having arrived without warning, I find myself feeling as though I’m inside a painting every evening. All I have to do is stop around half past seven, wherever I happen to be in the city, and simply take it all in. First, I allow myself to pause — something that, at that hour, in a city as ceaselessly in motion as Barcelona, has become almost an act of rebellion. I stop. I look at the sky as it presents itself that day. No two are ever alike. Even within a single minute, it is constantly changing.
And what surprises me most: even on days as gray as these last ones, when there's seemingly nothing to see, it's a gift. Only when we observe with time and without haste does the infinity of grays that can coexist in a single sky emerge: bluish gray, orangey gray, pearly gray. And so on, tirelessly. A palette that no oil paint manufacturer has ever been able, nor ever will be able, to fully reproduce.
If you want to see to what extent Barcelona's skies have fascinated those who have tried to capture them, go to the MNAC one day and walk through its rooms with your gaze upwards. Joaquín Mir, Joan González… The impossibility of fixing this constantly moving element on canvas is not a defeat for the painter: it is proof that nature always wins. And there, precisely in that tension between what is tried to be caught and what escapes, something akin to beauty is born.
There is a concept that describes the vertigo caused by confronting something too beautiful: Stendhal syndrome. The French writer fainted before the frescoes of Florence. I don't go that far, but something happens in the body when one truly stops and looks. A kind of inner expansion, as if the scale of things suddenly reordered itself. The day's problems lose weight. The mind, for a moment, stops making lists.
We live in a city that never stops growing, moving, reinventing itself. A city that attracts talent, that debates its identity, that negotiates its future. All of that is real and necessary. But this is also real: that every evening, at half past seven, Barcelona offers for free and without conditions one of the most extraordinary spectacles I know. And to see it, only one thing is needed that costs us more and more: to stop.
I feel small. And at the same time, immensely grateful. Grateful to live in a city that has the generosity to give away something so immense to whoever takes the trouble to look at it. The skies of Barcelona are no better or worse than those of Madrid. They are their own. They are something else. And that something else, if one learns to see it, is enough to change the tone of the entire day.