- POLEMIC. The victims of the Holy Family: «We do not want to leave»
- HISTORICAL: The burning city of Gaudí
Who will visit Gaudí when there are no tourists? The man from Barcelona usually has a love-hate relationship with his star architect: everything related to the Gaudí brand is synonymous with tourism, crowding, kitsch souvenirs and bars with scandalous prices. What will happen to your monuments in the Barcelona of the new normality? Monuments in private hands whose entrance is around an average of 20 euros and in which the local public barely represents 10%.
“For years, the people of Barcelona have not set foot in Gaudí's monuments. Except in La Pedrera to go see an exhibition, but not to the architectural complex ... If the Sagrada Familia opens without tourists and at 25 euros it will remain empty ", Juan José Lahuerta is so forceful ,director of the Gaudí Chair at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Since taking the reins of the Chair in 2016, Lahuerta has always been very critical of Gaudí's exploitation and commodification: «The Sagrada Familia is a tourist monster and Casa Batlló only wants to make money out of it. Even the Barcelona City Council has segregated Park Güell, inventing a name for a Monumental Zone, to turn it into a paid tourism place. Gaudí has always been the goose that lays the golden eggs in Barcelona, but nothing he generates really reverts to the city and the people of Barcelona ».
The Sagrada Familia has already recognized that it will not resume construction until tourism returns. "Right now, neither the date nor the form of reopening is clear," they admit from the temple. Although options such as reducing visiting hours and limiting the capacity to 1,000 people have been considered, as was done just before the confinement, the losses compared to the 2019 figures will be overwhelming: more than 4 million visitors, with income around of the 100 million euros. For now, residents have recovered the park in front of the temple and its adjacent streets that previously seemed like a tourist bus parking lot.
«There is total ignorance about who Gaudí was. It has become a commercial, malleable, digestible and easy product for mass tourism, forgetting all its complexity. Those who leave the Holy Family do so with a completely wrong idea: that of the isolated and misunderstood genius. The expiatory temple is a work that tries to create a symbolization of the society of Barcelona against its reality, which was the class struggle and violence in a time of great social conflict ", laments Lahuerta, one of the great experts in Gaudí (In 1993 he published a monograph on the architect, he directed the central exhibition of the Gaudí Year in 2002 and in his excellent essay Fuego y cenizas breaks all the topics on the context and Gaudí's work).
The Gaudí-merchandise is the basis of the Barcelona tourist model. «Barcelonans have been expelled from what was theirs, from a sentimental and spatial point of view. We must rethink the model of the city in general, but no one has spoken of how this crisis situation can be exploited, "says Lahuerta.
Last January, the City Council took the chest out of the 12 million tourists who had visited Barcelona during 2019 but also launched the idea of "decongesting" tourism, which is concentrated in the city center, to promote other areas such as Poblenou or the museum island of Montjuïc (chaired by the National Museum where, by the way, no public transport arrives: you have to go up a good flight of stairs if the mechanics are damaged, as often happens, and director Pepe Serra has been asking for a bus stop). After the confinement, Gaudí, postcard and image of Barcelona, could return to being from Barcelona.
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