The secrets of Horta, a neighborhood without tourists

When a foreign friend visits Barcelona for the first time or, when I feel like walking alone in a place without people, far from the increasingly ubiquitous shouting, I flee the temptation of the Eixample or the Gothic Quarter and take them to Horta, and more specifically to its Illa de les Bugaderes (for those lacking orientation and addicted to Maps like myself, the rectangle delimited by Granollers, Baixada de can Mateu, Llobregós streets and which has its neuralgic center on Aiguafreda street).

The theory is more or less known by everyone: as master Alexandre Cirici says in Barcelona pam a pam (recovered in 2012 by Comanegra with a frankly mediocre and tedious edition by architect and former councilwoman Itziar González Virós), Horta "is a simple town with traditional customs," a place where, as cheesy columnists would say, "time seems to have stopped" and, even more so, if one explores this street of unmatched beauty, amidst a string of beautiful little houses where laundresses worked more than a century ago with views of the bare mountain, some buildings and wells that have remained intact and are now a small oasis of gardens where you would give your life to stay and take a nap.

The Commonplace is as true as it is dangerous, because if we continue with the cheesy dictionary, we would have to say "when you walk here it seems like you're not in Barcelona," and there's some truth to it, because Horta preserves the soul of a neighborhood of small local businesses, where people greet each other beyond the protocol of a head nod, and where tourism is a word alien to the daily dictionary. But we must rebel against forgetfulness and the McDonaldization of our streets, because this corner of the Bugaderes is not a museum, but a living part of Barcelona that speaks with the unique voice of its history, as well as a vital heritage of the country that we must force ourselves to conjugate in the present if we do not want to fall ill with sentimentalism.

If this foreign friend (or the imaginary friend I talk to only when I wander) asked me what kind of people we are, I have no better answer than the hundred steps required by Aiguafreda street, a sum of homes that love old stone and rationalization, but where no facade is the same as another, where people's universe is marked by the house window and the garden is a space of controlled madness.

Now it had been too long since I had gone up to Horta and when I arrive at Plaça Eivissa I rediscover the calm of real terraces, those of Frankfurt Júlia and Bar Petit, on one side, and the magnificent corner of La Fonda on the other. The deans, Bodega Massana and Quimet, play it cool and close during August, following this disastrous custom of vacation and leisure. It is worth linking these two establishments from the beginning of Horta street to Campoamor and saying an Our Father in the charming church of Sant Joan.

The neighborhood is founded on the dialectic between the center, very modest like a grocery store (sometimes excessively so; it would be worthwhile for some privileged mind from the City Council to rescue its beautiful Ateneo from decrepitude to weave a good cultural project there), and the route to the western streets where you find houses from when the Barcelona bourgeoisie had more than one neuron and knew how to differentiate a Wagnerian chord from a Mozartian one. If you lack money for tourism and the donkey through Europe, stop messing around and follow the route that goes from Avinguda del Estatut to the Laberint Park and strengthen your calves until you reach the Can Gallart estate.

Some of Horta's buildings are publicly owned (now I mentioned one, known as El Palau de les Heures, which the Barcelona Provincial Council restored, ceding it to the Fundació Bosch i Gimpera of the UB), and it would be worthwhile for some creative soul of our council to rethink its use for the benefit of the citizens, which, in turn, could make Barcelona's fellow citizens start moving their butts out of their neighborhood to visit a unique place in the city.

In Horta there are houses from when the Barcelona bourgeoisie had more than one neuron and knew how to differentiate a Wagnerian chord from a Mozartian one

We rightly condemn the desertification of neighborhoods due to the effect of mass tourism, but as I said last week referring to the Gothic Quarter, we forget our own responsibility when it comes to abandoning some of the most beautiful neighborhoods in our city.This is what happened with this magnificent villa in Horta, a neighborhood that this author ofThe Stabadores for its sepulchral silence and that very Catalan face of antipathy that its natives give you when you bother them by visiting their streets. Barcelona needs a brilliant soul capable of imagining traditional neighborhoods that are also heritage and landscape for all Barcelonans.

While waiting for this genius, this year we learned that the City Council and the Vertix real estate group were perpetrating the demolition of part of the constructions in Baixada de San Mateu, and many neighbors have warned us of the intention to demolish the houses and orchards on Llobregós street to create gardens for a new housing development that would mutilate the aesthetic unity of the place. It is enough to look at the Illa de les Bugaderes to see that the place, beyond being preserved and not building footballers' houses next to it, should be opened to the neighborhood; if anything needs to be demolished, it is the walls that isolate it, which could be used to pacify Llobregós street and expand the natural gardens of the old laundresses and open a square there.

Barcelona needs a brilliant soul capable of imagining traditional neighborhoods that are also heritage and landscape for all Barcelonans

In our city, there is an excess of desire to pacify the streets (some of them without any need), and it seems incredible that such an easily improvable place could end up forming part of the extensive catalog of our urban planning blunders.

Aiguafreda street is one of the most beautiful places in the city. To anyone who has the mere idea of destroying it, of course, the full force of my dagger will fall upon them. Residents of Horta, if you need a soldier to save it, you know where I am. I go up from time to time, without bothering too much, I insist; only when I want to steal a little silence from the neighborhood and I want to show a friend from outside that I live in a city of houses, wells, ancient stone and civilized people.