Barcelona Today

Barcelona Today

Capital of an ever-more-autonomous Catalonia, Barcelona continues to thrive as a bilingual (Catalan and Spanish) city in love with everything avant-garde.

A Tale of Two Cities

Having languished for centuries in official "second-city" status compared to Madrid, Barcelona's drive to excel, create, innovate, and improvise is largely a result of its ongoing obsession with eclipsing its eternal rival. Even within Barcelona, a healthy sense of national identity goads designers, architects, merchants, and industrialists to ever higher levels of originality and effectiveness. Ever since 1990, when the International Olympic Committee announced that the 1992 Olympic Games were to be held in the Catalan capital, Barcelona has been booming with pride and confidence in its ever brighter future as (finally!) a bona fide European capital on its own.

Art, Design, Architecture, Fashion & Style

Now that the city's haute couture status is increasingly recognized as biting at the heels of more-established runway stars such as Paris and Milan, present-day Barcelona more and more resembles a carousel of postmodern visual surprises from "cool hunter" Bread & Butter fashions to Jean Nouvel's Torre Agbar gherkin, or Norman Foster's giant erector-set communications tower on the Collserola skyline.

Haute Cuisine Hotbed

Ever since Ferran Adrià and El Bulli became an infamous reference for La Nueva Cocina (aka molecular gastronomy) in Northern Catalonia's Roses, the spin-off success, especially in Barcelona, has exponentially expanded. With more than a dozen superstar restaurants winning international awards and more on the way, keeping abreast of the city's culinary rock stars can be a dizzying pursuit. Direct Adrià disciples such as Sergi Arola at the Hotel Arts and Carles Abellán at Comerç 24 join Adrià precursors such as Jean Louis Neichel or old pals like Fermin Puig at the Hotel Majestic's Drolma, along with relative newcomers such as Jordi Artal of Cinc Sentits or Jordi Herrera of Manairó in a glittering galaxy of gastronomical creativity. Meanwhile, carpetbaggers like the Roca brothers from Girona or Martin Berasategui from even farther afield in San Sebastián have opened award-winning hotel restaurants in, respectively, the Omm (Moo) and the Condes de Barcelona (Lasarte) even as younger and smaller restaurants such Saüc, Ot, and Tram-Tram are producing creative and streamlined cuisine at less than bank-breaking prices.

Political Progress

The approval of Catalonia's controversial new Autonomy Statute in 2006 has ushered in a wave of change in Catalonia. Bitterly opposed by the right-wing Partido Popular, the new autonomy agreement gives Catalonia a larger slice of local taxes and more control of its own infrastructure such as ports, airports, and the high-speed AVE train. Perhaps more importantly, the new statute reinforces the use of the Catalan language and formally establishes Catalonia as one of the most progressive pockets in Europe, with special provisions safeguarding human rights on same-sex marriage, euthanasia, and abortion that would win scant support in other moretraditional regions of Spain.