Our prototypical Gràcia friend is a being who always leaves the Gràcia neighborhood on the occasion of its main festival. This person, who usually defines themselves as a Gràcia-native-for-life and reminds us too often that Gràcia was an independent town from Barcelona before Cerdà started acting as the mind master of the urban setup, used to escape to the beaches of Menorca during the last two weeks of August. At that time, our friend with the Gràcia chromosome argued that the Gràcia festivals were no longer the same because most Barcelonians (from other neighborhoods) took advantage of the colorful streets and the nocturnal xerinola to send their night's sleep to hell and leave everything well peed on. Non-Gràcia Barcelonians, therefore, had the honor of being the first invaders of the Gràcia festivals, long before the Lonely Planet effect and influencers turned intrusion into a global phenomenon.
Some Gràcia residents have reacted to the globalization of their festival (we clarify that "theirs" here acquires a sense of both physical ownership and historical narrative) by smearing some facades in the neighborhood with the slogan tourists go home. The phrase is a very interesting compendium of contradictions, not only because the condition of a tourist essentially consists of being someone who flees their home to travel and because appealing to the respect of a neighborhood is difficult to defend by defiling walls with graffiti, but also because the desire to expel travelers, accusing them of contaminating a neighborhood, has become the form of xenophobia habitually tolerated by the sensible Barcelonian. During the last five years, especially in Ciutat Vella, the sheets displayed on neighborhood balconies against tourist overcrowding read phrases like "we want to sleep" or other creative outbursts such as "Barceloneta: Europe's largest dump."
But the amendment to tourist otherness has become total. Deep down, Barcelonians long for the confined way of life in which, to put it mildly, people had the kindness to stay home and the city streets became a natural landscape overflowing with wild boars. I understand that many indigenous people of Gràcia get furious seeing how the neighborhood streets are crammed with queues of tourists that can reach a hundred meters. If I were a wet-blanket cultural critic from the CCCB, I would now hit you with a critical theory spiel about how cities have madly transitioned from the paradigm of habitability to that of predatory visitation and (honoring the tribe's excessive fondness for nostalgia) I would appeal to the recovery of neighborhoods by their aborigines. I'm sorry: on the contrary, I love cities because they are predatory and I already like that places, in general, never quite belong entirely to anyone.
I love cities because they are predatory and I already like that places, in general, never quite belong entirely to anyoneThe lifelong resident says that in Gràcia you can no longer go down to the street to improvise a chat with friends around a small wooden table because the neighborhood is contaminated with tourist apartments. I don't know the reality of Gràcia, but I can assure you (as a tenant in Ciutat Vella) that if we don't go down to chat with the neighbors on August nights, it's not thanks to the overcrowding of tourists in the bars or because the streets are overflowing, but because we are cloistered at home watching Depp vs. Heardon Netflix and, let's be honest, because ---if it weren't for the WhatsApp group created to resolve incidents on the staircase--- we wouldn't even know the names of most of our neighbors.I do not believe that the current confinement of Barcelona residents is the fault of the more uncivilized visitors who come from Naples or Toyohashi.On the contrary, I would say that all of this is due to blindly buying into the slogancitizens stay home.
But not even my most naive spirit will change an immutable reality shared by all Barcelona residents: we know for a fact that tourists, like hell, are always others and that, when in doubt, the best solution is nostalgia. But, believe me, not even nostalgia is what it used to be. And, as always happens, my friend from Gràcia will soon return home (super tanned) and will be able to contemplate "his" clean streets and thus crack some wonderful scrambled eggs in his new favorite brunch spot.
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