When you start to approach the Barcelona on the flight in, you notice that the city is surrounded by mountains. One distant Barcelona neighborhood, Sarrià-Sant Gervasi, is at the foot of those mountains and is where all the wealthiest Barcelonians live (yeah, that’s what they’re called in English). Also, there is a funicular up in those mountains that goes even higher, which I really wanted to try, because funicular is enjoyable both to ride and to pronounce.
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be really wealthy in Barcelona, and who hasn’t, I can tell you a few things now. They live in houses like this . .
And this.
There are a lot of banks, financial advisory firms and high-end food stores in the neighborhood, and the women all smell of perfume. I originally wrote “expensive perfume,” but really, what do I know about that?
Anyway, it turns out that the funicular is partway up the mountain in a park. You can take a bus there, but you can also walk, which I did. It involved going up a large hill to the park entrance and then climbing up many isolated, steep paths to dead ends, which led me to other steep paths that meandered up the mountain . . .
This is how high up I was just getting to the beginning of the funicular.
. . . and eventually to this encouraging sign.
Ultimately, after a 45-minute hike up and down and up the mountain, my last clean t-shirt half soaked in sweat, I finally reached the funicular.
And on a political note – there has been a lot of turmoil in this part of Spain, which is the part that wants to secede from the rest of the country. There was a Brexit-like secession vote when I was here in 2017, but the whole episode was a disaster for a variety of reasons and honestly, both sides came out of it looking pretty bad.
Anyway, the leader of the Catalan government fled to Belgium and then kind of disappeared. But other government leaders were actually arrested and charged with something like treason and the court is expected to rule on those charges in the next couple of weeks, so the whole separatist thing is starting to heat up again.
This means demonstrations and flags. The traditional Catalan flag is just yellow and red stripes, but the separatist movement flag adds a blue triangle with a white star. Anti-separatists snidely remark that the addition makes it look like Cuba’s flag. True enough, but it also looks like Puerto Rico’s flag.
Anyway, I mention all this just to give context to this 30-foot long flag I saw today, which shows both extra commitment and some serious sewing skills.
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