What is it about a city that as soon as you enter it, you feel drawn into it and attracted to it? What is it that gives you goose bumps and tingles you as you wander the streets at night-time, listen to a concert, look into doorways, watch people, or take in the rolling waving lines of a Gaudi design?
We've found never diminishing beauty in the rough and smooth walls and cobbled streets. The old quarter seems to breathe, almost with a recognisable rhythm, as the sun takes long-stretched hours to settle behind old buildings. The light stays golden and warm for ages after the sun has set, and we're surprised, night after night, that it's really as late as the tolling bells say it is.
Music is everywhere. It bubbles to us from an unseen jazz duo in a bar that we pass. From around the corner of a plaza where a young cellist practices in front of an old fountain. From a concert we go to in a museum of modern art. From the sumptuous music room of a Gaudi house where a tenor drives us crazy with delight as he sings "Nessun Dorma". And from three young people at a table next to us, at a cafe in a square, who quietly go over their repertoire for some performance they are about to give, in hushed harmonies.
People are not intrusive. They wait to see if you have a need, or if you're ready to order, or if you have a question and want more information. We're not confronted by pushiness, and sense a respectful patience. There are smiles but they're reserved. There is laughter at some silly mistake or difficulty in being understood, but it's accompanied by a lingering twinkling look rather than the smugness of having achieved an advantage over a tourist.
People have, and do, bother to do things. Over a hundred years ago the Modernisme movement created spectacular redesigns of homes by Gaudi and other architects and designers because they bothered to make things better. The government has bothered to maintain the building program of the Sagrada Familia in a time of massive and for many people, debilitating economic burden. Hundreds of architects, designers, ceramicists, plasterers, builders, painters and weavers continue to bother to recreate Gaudi's dream of the Sagrada Familia after his designs and plans were destroyed in Franco's time.
And to the simple things: a taxi driver bothers to laugh with us as we load a month's supply of food and alcohol into the small boot of his car; the security guard at the marina always bothers to smile and say "buenos dias" even if it's the eighth time we've walked past him that morning; the shop owner bothers to give us explicit instructions and a diagram on how to find a very local ATM rather than wave us in some vague direction; and a waitress is tickled pink that we've come back to her cafe two days in a row, and bothers to notice and to welcome us.
It's a city where beauty mingles with smelly wafts of sewerage from some unidentified source, and where the breathtaking efficiency of the underground train system sits alongside strangely absent security checks in many public places. It's where we sit at a young-modern edgy cafe with good food and in turn are asked for food and money by trembling people.
Sitting in Placa de George Orwell, and having just read his book "Homage to Catalonia", we're aware of the hard battles that have taken place here, and again have a better but still limited understanding of the complexities of political belief, of conquests and conflicts, of terror and peace-at-a-price that have cast the background to our very brief exposure.
So the things that we love have something to do with history and its presence today, and with the softness of the light. It's about the warmth of this time of year, and the ever-present warmth of people who care. It's about the senses and how they come alive with things that are so pleasant to see and hear and smell. It's easy to accept that occasionally you fall in love with cities like this.
