first paragraph of Mendoza´s La Ciudad de los Prodigios
El rio LLobregat
Originally uploaded by falconetti2007The year in which Onofre Bouvila arrived in Barcelona the city was in a fever of renovation. This city is situated in a valley that leaves the coastal mountain range withdrawn a little toward the interior, between Malgrat (Despite) and Garraf (Carafe), such that in this manner it forms a kind of amphitheater. There the climate is tempered and without extremes: the skies are usually clear and bright; the clouds, few, and yet white clouds; the atmospheric pressure is stable; the rain, scarse, but treacherous and torrential at times. Though debated by some, the dominant opinion attributes its foundation first and second to the Phoenicians. At least we know that it entered its history as a colony of Carthage, in turn allied with Sidon and Tirol. It is proved that Hannibal's elephants stopped to drink and mingle in the rivers of Besos and Llobregat in the road to the Alps, where the cold and unfortunate terrain decimated them. The first barceloneses were struck marvelled at the sight of those animals. Had to see those tusks, what ears!, what trunks or noses, they said. This shared astonishment and the subsequent commentaries lasting many years germinated Barcelona's identity as urban nucleus; soon misplaced, the Barcelonians of the 19th century strove to recover this identity.
After the Phoenicians followed the Greeks and the Laietani (pre-Roman Iberians of the region of Barcelona). The first left in their footstep handmade artifacts; to the second we owe two definitive traits of the race, according to ethnologists: the tendency of Catalans to tilt their head to the left when listening and the propensity of the men to grow long hair in their nasal orifices. The Laietani, of which we know little, nourished themselves principally by a milk derivative that sometimes appears mentioned as suero (whey; buttermilk) and other times as limonada (lemonade) and that did not differ much from current yogurt. Nevertheless, it is the Romans who imprint on Barcelona its character, they who definitively structured it; in this way, being useless to go into detail, that would mark its future evolution. Everything indicates, still, that the Romans felt a proud disdain with respect to Barcelona. They seemed uninterested in it either for strategic reasons or for affinities of any other sort. In the year 63 after our Lord one such Murcio Alejandrino, praetor (Roman magistrate), writes to his father-in-law and protector in Rome lamenting having been destined for Barcelona: he had solicited a place in the splendid Bilbilis Augusta, being currently Catalayud (a minor city in Aragon).
Atualfo was the Gothic firecrest that conquered it and remained under the Goths until the Saracens took it without a fight in the year 717 of our era. According to their habits, the Moors limited themselves to converting the cathedral (not the one we admire today, but another still older, raised and transported to another site, stage of many conversions and martyrdoms) into a mosque and not much more. The French recovered it for the faith in 785 and two fair centuries later, in 985, again for Islam: Almanzor or Al-Mansur, the Pious, the Pityless, He Who Has Only Three Teeth. Conquests and reconquests showed their influence in the thickness and complexity of its walls. Corseted in bulwarks and concentric fortifications, the streets became each time more sinuous; this attracting the Hebrew cabalists of Girona, who found subsidiaries of their sect there and dig passages transporting the secret sanhedrins and to sacred pools discovered in the XX century during the construction of the metro. In the rock lintels (entranceway stone) of the old neighborhood you can still read the scrawlings that are passwords for the initiate, formulas to attain the unthinkable, etc. Soon the city would know years of splendor and dark ages.