“One only has to let Barcelonians talk for a few minutes to glimpse the truth: their critical attitude is a defense mechanism.”



Barcelona is a city that has learned, for better and for worse, how to be seen. Once defined by its own rhythms, it now evolves under constant observation and patronage by visitors from around the world—to the perpetual chagrin of Barcelonians. 


Anna Pazos is a Barcelonian, no two ways about it: so skeptical of the city’s tourist influx that she’s never visited the Sagrada Familia, even though she lives just a block away. But in accepting the challenge to write about her hometown, the better to reconcile newcomers and locals, she discovers a deep well of affection for it, an appreciation of the way the twists and turns of its history have only made it more expansively, beguilingly itself.


Candid and urbane, Barcelona is a lesson in how centuries of upheaval—empires and epidemics and wars, fascist dictatorship and linguistic schism, Art Nouveau and the Olympics—have shaped the present of a city that is at once majestic and garish and irrepressibly alive.


Translated from the Catalan by Paul Sánchez Keighley


Part of Travel with a Writer, The Walking Tree's global literary travel series pairing acclaimed writers with the cities and places they know intimately. Combining literary essays and fiction, original infographics, curated walks, and beautiful design, each volume is a literary companion to place, designed to be read in a single sitting. Together, the series forms a growing literary atlas of the world.