The Sounds and Smells of Barcelona

Just to back-track a moment. My strategy for our 8-day trip to Barcelona was to pack very, very light. Carry-on light. This meant summer clothes with just a couple of sweaters all rolled up in a carry-on suitcase with just a couple of extra pairs of socks and underwear. Side note: it’s important to plan your daily attire carefully when taking this approach! In hindsight, I unfortunately expected warmer weather so my pants and sweaters got a bit over-worn, but I took home only one single pair of shorts that didn’t get worn so I consider that a success.

Anyway … sounds and smells!

We stayed at the Hotel Colon, directly facing the Barcelona Cathedral in the gothic quarter (I highly recommend any hotel that is located in this ancient and beautiful part of town). This is important to the story because we spent an inordinate amount of time wandering the narrow and winding streets of gothic Barcelona, between buildings that were often re-purposed from the old city walls dating back 2,000 years. TWO THOUSAND YEARS!!! Barcelona stands on top of an old Roman city known as Barcino, built sometime around year 0 (zero!). Cool! However this means that god only knows what the underlying sewer and water systems are like, and it also means that the city, at least the gothic quarter, smells like pee on a good day and sewage on a bad one. Like after a heavy rainstorm, for example. Not like Venice bad, don’t get me wrong! But there is a definite underlying pee smell all through the area.* The second-floor corridor of our hotel also had a distinctly unpleasant odor of mildew as well. Jeff thinks this is why so many people in Spain smoke – to hide the smell of urine. Mmmmm!

This leads directly to the next-most-prominent smell in Barcelona: cigarette smoke. We, who live in Canada, tend to forget what the world was like before we banished smokers to the far reaches of the workplace parking lot or refuse storage area. But if you’re looking for an odorous trip down memory lane, Barcelona is a good candidate. That said, Jeff is correct in that it really does tend to cover the smell of pee!

Again, this was mostly noticeable outdoors in the gothic quarter (but stay in this area anyway if you are planning to visit, it’s worth it). We visited several places away from this area and it was fine. Practically no odor of bodily discharge at all!

On a less pungent note, while wandering through the gothic quarter we occasionally encountered cars or trucks which I initially found very surprising given the lack of space to accommodate them! But then, these were all taxis and municipal vehicles like garbage trucks and street cleaners, which in hindsight seems important. But the number of people they had to try to squeeze past was sometimes a little alarming. What was the most surprising, though, is that I never heard a car horn honking. Even when people were standing around blocking the “road” because they had clearly not noticed a car or truck trying to sneak by, the drivers just quietly inched ahead until an opening appeared. I’m wondering now if there is some kind of bylaw about honking. Either that or are the Catalan people just extraordinarily patient and polite? My money is on bylaw …

Once we were in the busy-street areas of the city, however, traffic noise (still no horns!) became the predominant sound. Enough so that it became irritating to the point that my primary goal was to get back onto a quite laneway.

Back in the tight streets of the gothic quarter, what you did hear was the sounds of people talking. Sometimes to each other, but often it was people talking into their cell phones on speaker as they walked through the streets. Never with headphones, and never with the phone held up to their ear. I’ve determined that the best way to look like a local in Barcelona is to loudly say Catalan words into a cell phone that you are holding up flat in front of your face while walking around.

*It’s possible the smells were exacerbated by recent torrential rains after 3 or 4 years of drought (seriously!!) but still. Pee.

Coming up: the architectural Gaudiness of Barcelona.