Montjuïc cemetery publishes a little map which, interested in historical renown, guides you past the generally terribly tedious tombs of well-known Barcelona citizens (good, bad, ugly) and thus omits the quite extraordinary artistic achievements of some of its less well-documented residents. Here is one of the finest funeral monuments, built by people who have clearly […]

Brief for Barcelona council
Eduardo Chillida sold us a “sculpture” called In praise of water/Elogi de l’aigua/Elogio del agua. In fact it is clearly nothing of the kind. It is a poorly-built orange-peel hydraulic grab, of the type used in quarrying. That explains why he had it put in the old quarry at Creueta del Coll. […]

It hasn’t rained very much in Barcelona for quite a long time. You can see the filth awaiting this Renfe train as it passes the Fecsa power station heading south over the Besós.

The famous “Kiss of death” memorial sculpture in Poble Nou cemetery, photo by the excellent izarbeltza, regularly visited on one of these Barcelona walks:

A more earthy interpretation, from a Chinese shop, also in Barcelona:

Opposite the district offices in the Gardens of the Prince of Gerona on Lepanto. Far better than the real thing, which is only fun to visit if you pretend to be a stone mason.

Taken towards the end of this walk, it demonstrates some of the impact of the speculative development programmed by Barcelona’s eco-warrior council over the past five years.

If I could do rather more advanced wheelies on my Batavus Tripper I would post aerial shots of the dramatic shifts in the shoreline as a consequence of the […]

I recently had lunch with a Huescan entrepreneur who sold his dad’s cows in the 50s to buy a car, but this is ridiculous.
[
Update: D confirms that Srecko Djordjevic is not an anagram of for example “jive jerks cod cord” and points out that he has form:

A man chopped his own penis off with a […]

Would those who say that we should hang on to a few Francos because it was how things were, weren’t it, say the same of images of Marx? I’m something a fan of the Roman custom of leaving statue torsos intact and swapping heads as each dictator came and went.

Check out these Russian scrapers. (Via BB; more Agbar here.)

If the ruling Galician national socialists want to redefine the region in their statute of autonomy as the “nation of Breogan” (their leader says their identity is in their genes), does that mean that, like their mythical hero, they’re going to spend all their money building a great big tower and then take the whole […]

I failed to get into the Agbar tower a while back with a bunch of tourists who had agreed to impersonate a business delegation. Eulàlia Petit, however, has been inside and up Jean Nouvel’s phallus suppository rocket volcano-fired geyser. Its colours are red for fire, blue for water, and white for steam, and the irregular […]

I first signed up for a gym a couple of years ago because in all honesty I had become a rather chubby gent. Of course it was capitalism that made me fat, thrusting into my path the opportunity to have two magnificent lunches a day at the top of a large tower with excellent head-on […]

Broken lightning conductor on a stork chimney in Barbastro.

Just as it is difficult to understand how politicians can be so negligent or corrupt as to dig tunnels into which their voters’ flats then tumble, so it is hard to accept that Barcelona’s water utility can get away with building extravagant towers when their product is still undrinkable. I woke up last night and, […]

There’s a good post over at Confrontación about the current Telefónica hard sell, which involves pestering hapless consumers with something worse than they’ve already got. Someone I know down south just had to wait four months for a line to be put in, and no, I really don’t want to hear your own Telefónica story.

If the gentleman opposite were to imitate Stefan@MemeFirst’s excellent unlicensed extension of the 1776ft Freedom Tower scheme, he’d be able to give his building two names: for official purposes, The Tiberias Building Building, and in recognition of the illegal storey he has balanced on top, The Fidenae Stadium Collapse Building.

No help for the beardless wonder in the search for Conan Doyle’s Reminiscence of Cricket, but I did find two wonderful poems by South Asian schoolboys. Cricket Teams by Raza Shahban Ali of Fatimiyah Boys School, Karachi would have been an outstanding review of the world scene, had his laudatory couplet about England not been […]

The news today is dominated by the anarchist attempt on prime minister Antonio Maura near the Mercé on the 12th, the visit of Spanish king Alfonso to Catalonia (”The Velocipedists Club raised an obelisk formed of flowers”), and the Russo-Japanese war. However, a couple of interstitial text ads caught my eye in the edition of […]

The excellent Margaret Marks has pointed out some good photos by Michael Jennings of Jean Nouvel’s tower (more scrapers here) for Barcelona’s Agbar water company. (Agbar is one of the many subsidiaries of Ondeo, the water division of dodgy (analysts/lobby) mega-utility Suez.) The tower is located just off Gloriès, perhaps the worst urban development […]