A pun on Never say never again on Gracia’s only SWP bodega (one of the proprietors claims to have known Yigael Gluckstein) may be suggesting that may be no imminent solution to the problem of bearded nutters rocketing their neighbours and then moaning about the response.
In other graffiti today, the anarchist nutters in the lovely [...]

Check out this piece by Nicholas Mead on the thorough screwing the impoverished Carmel district of Barcelona is receiving from the socialist council in alliance with developers. It’s ironic that many of the same socialists jumped up and down with glee when local lad Juan Marsé won some writing prize or other. One can safely [...]

The Google Earth version of ancient Rome is a bit like a collection of faked-up trainspotters’ notebooks. Until they find some way of populating it with exfoliant opera, our best bet as responsible amateur social historians is the porn industry:
European production company Daring Media Group will release its first movie, Roma, in October at the [...]

BA’s Highlife mag goes lowlife: “After 40 years of mass tourism, Torremolinos continues to evolve and, away from the coast, it’s a bustling Andalucian town. The high-rise 1950s and 1960s hotels are now admired by fashionable architects. The campaign to make it a Unesco World Heritage site begins here.” I’ve been going to Benidorm for [...]

El blog Ausente links to a piece by Rinzewind (which links etc etc) about Valdeluz. This is the settlement built in the desert outside Guadalajara and equipped with a high-speed train station in what appeared to be a corrupt development deal engineered by PP bigwigs Esperanza Aguirre and Álvarez Cascos with the blessing of PSOE [...]

Sevillanadas has photoshopped back into place one of the Moorish city’s gates, demolished in 1868 by the same man who restored it twenty years earlier following a serious bout of generalised brotherly hate. Will it now be rebuilt?

Calle Ferran de Barcelona, invierno de 1911. La calle se distingue por su concurrencia y por la ininterrumpida presencia de tiendas y escaparates. Nos encontramos sin duda en una de las calles más animadas de la ciudad y al parecer vía predilecta de tiendas de gran prestigio: nos cruzamos con la pastelería Massana [Mr Massana [...]

Just in case any of you are experts in this kind of thing, here’s where I’m at:

Data collection is fine. My Garmin eTrex Vista HCx doesn’t get near the sales claim that “Deep foliage, nor canyons phase the rugged eTrex Vista HCx”–it gets lost quite easily between quite modest buildings in down-town Barcelona–but it’s OK.
Data [...]

Lenox has a sighting of a man living inside a bin in Valencia. Is this the same one I saw? I suppose you could see it as an eco-version of a camper van. With a couple of donkeys you could probably get up and down the Levant without too much difficulty.

Someone just wondered whether this walk was an anti-tour. Um, not according to Daniel Kalder, aka the first international congress of Anti-Tourists at the Shymkent Hotel, Shymkent, Kazakhstan, October 1999:
The anti-tourist does not visit places that are in any way desirable.
The anti-tourist eschews comfort.
The anti-tourist embraces hunger and hallucinations and shit hotels.
The anti-tourist seeks [...]

The belated price for being unable to govern oneselves: “The Commission states that the awarding of the Integrated Action Programmes (IAP), an urban development measure established by Law 6/1994 of 15 November, Valencian Law on development activities (‘LRAU’) and its successor, Law 16/205, Valencian development law (‘LUV’) relates to public works contracts which should be [...]

At the beginning of the last century one Professor Max-Bembo published La mala vida en Barcelona: anormalidad, miseria y vicio, which in authentic Daily Mail style vaguely enjoined the government to do something about the social and sexual degradation he profited from in such loving and lascivious detail. Here’s the section on wankworkers, copy-pasted from [...]

Opposite, another: Valle-Inclán’s neighbour lived here.

Ah, but how long before it is rebuilt as a theme park? Plaza de San Felipe Neri is one of the most interesting examples of the latter in Barcelona. Only in the demolition of marginal and shanty towns have Spanish planners approached the rigour of the Chinese authorities. Half of the valley of Torre del [...]

Étienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (excerpt) is his novelised idealisation of Napoleonic nationalist totalitarianism: if not exactly a New Jerusalem, then certainly a New Paris, built around a New Seine, designed by its dictator, the Icar. This book and its hype led hundreds of families, mainly French, principally artesans (sez James Chastain) to doom and [...]

Quite a lot of the Barcelona mapping at OpenStreetMap.org is already more detailed and reliable than some commercial products I’ve seen, although I briefly thought Plaça dels Angels had been mapped by skaters. Whatever happened to the UPC Barcelona mapping party?

Apparently it’s quite well-known, but I only found it this morning in HG Bohn’s A hand-book of proverbs (1855), in the household reading room:
To build castles in the air. Far castelli in aria.–Ital. The French say, Faire des chateaux en Espagne.
It is tempting although perhaps erroneous to believe that this derives from Frankish experiences with [...]

Generic Manu Chao-ist dumbagogy in Che Sudaka’s latest ¡uf!re, but a nice little Raval puppet theatre by Marta Pujol & Joan Picó:
Something with a bit more musical class (tho in playback) from pioneer Peret, Mataró-born and hence the only sensible reason why the genre is called rumba catalana instead of barcelonesa:

I sometimes wonder what would [...]

We say we’re anti-nuclear and then buy electricity from the French; we say we care about water conservation while doing everything possible to make Barcelona unsustainable; but if we’re going to keep on moaning about the fuel consumption of the unspeakable Yankees, at least we could end eco-Barcelona’s facking absurd ban on hanging washing to [...]

Actually Ludwig Hilberseimer, Entwurf für eine Hochhausstadt/Design for a high-rise city (1924). Hitler exported idealistic architects rather than bombs to the US. Hilberseimer ran the Chicago planning department for a while, and they and other public institutions have spent the last ten years tearing down projects built by him and other Bauhaus luminaries.
Enthusiasm in [...]