Barcelona: It's About Time
A visitor learns the tempo of a city where life is sweet, morning comes late, and the artistic spirit is alive and thriving.

By M.L. Lyke
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, May 20, 2007

The dancer's hands fly, clap, tease, curl the edge of her ruffled skirt as guitar notes slide from major to minor scales. Her flamenco partner shoots her a look of long-lashed seduction, clacking his booted heels fast, faster, until it looks as if he's dancing an inch above the wooden stage.

Their faces are fierce. This is passion, not pap. When they finally touch, it's a touch of possession, not invitation.

Minutes later, the too-bright lights come on in Barcelona's famed flamenco club Tarantos. We are quickly shooed out before the next set begins.

I look at my Swatch: 9 o'clock.

At home, I'd be snuggling into jammies and sliding under the covers with a good book. Here, on a balmy April evening, on our first night in a city where time's as fluid as a Dali clock and sleep's best dealt with in a midday siesta, my night is just beginning.

Tapas, anyone? Tapas and jazz? Tapas and jazz, dinner and dancing?

I find my second wind, then my third, sometimes my fourth, every night in this pricey, arty, sophisticated Mediterranean hot spot rumbling with techno, salsa, samba, world music, hip-hop, indie pop and . . . Windy City blues? That's what we find 'round midnight at the Bel-Luna Jazz Club, where Lluis Coloma, a student of Chicago blues, throws up a locomotive boogie-woogie bass and ices it with fancy pickwork on the high notes.

"Uno . . . dos . . . tres."

Where did he get that 1957 Hammond B-3 organ?

Crazy minds are at play in Barcelona, morning to night, night to morning.

You can see it in the liquid lines of Antonio Gaudí's architecture, modernist constructions that describe snails and fruit, flowers and trees. You can see it in the bold Crayola sculptures of Joan Miró, exuding lightness and gravitas. Who thought joy was simple?

You can see it down the narrow, twisting side streets of Barri Gotic -- the Gothic quarter -- where cartoon graffiti covers shop doors and street performers cast illusions faster than a sultry Spanish dusk casts shadows. We watched a silent improv artist throw down a small circle of clothespins inside a medieval plaza, then wave everyone away from his mimed territory. He stopped bicyclists in their tracks. One shamed biker braked, backed up and curved around the artist's creation.

I stepped carefully around it myself, remembering a favorite old phrase: "The fools always get it right."

Our April mornings in Barcelona began late, 9-ish. Then, as the week wore on, 10-ish. Each a.m. started with thick espresso, heavily sugared and topped with crema. The rich brew left archaeological rings in my tiny cup. I complemented the espresso with a chocolate croissant bursting with cocoa goo that oozed down my chin.

Life is short. And, in Barcelona, darkly sweet.

After breakfast -- or was this brunch? -- we strolled down Las Ramblas, the tree-lined, heavily touristed promenade in the Gothic quarter where sidewalk minstrels strum guitars, artists quick-sketch portraits, stallkeepers arrange bouquets, an erotic museum unveils ancient secrets, and spray-painted mimes transform themselves into living statues of gargoyles, pistol-packing cowboys and snarling red devils to solicit euros from passersby. Pay up or go to hell.

We had 10 days to get a feel for this whirling dervish of a city, where the once-repressed Catalan language again flourishes, dominating museum labels and street signs. Those 10 days would include a side trip to the pretty little coastal town of Cadaques, Salvador Dali's old haunt. We wanted night life, day life, a big dose of art and architecture, history, mystery and a little beach-town hang time. We wanted it all. Were we headed for tourist wipeout?

Enter the Dragon

If every town has a heart, Gaudí is the pumping aorta of Barcelona. The only uninspired, straight lines you'll see around his buildings are the long queues of tourists waiting to get inside. Even using discount coupons, we laid out $18.50 each for tickets to the Casa Batllo, a private home remodeled by Gaudí in 1905, at a time when the free imaginations of architects were fed by the deep pockets of turn-of-the-century patrons ready to outdo one another in artistic excess.

I'd give Gaudí 11 lopsided stars for the Batllo, with its scaly skin, heaving dragon's back undulating across the roof and masked skulls of the dragon's victims suggested in patio facings below. Inside, all is fluid: Great halls arch like hands in prayer, light fixtures suggest chambered nautiluses, doors wave like ribbons, inset with curving stained glass.

And that was Gaudí 101. The scale grew grander at his century-old Parc Guell, wrapped around a hillside with magnificent views of Barcelona and the Mediterranean. The long serpentine benches weaving along the park perimeter are inset with lovely mosaic designs created from shattered ceramics -- bits of tile, shards of glass, pieces of dinner plates. The tiny bits seemed testament to the power of the small in the glory of the large.

I wandered the park's garden trails and found myself slipping inside a strange, immense earthen tunnel, another Gaudí creation. Imagine a frozen wave. Imagine that wave as bits of stone and soil. Imagine that you're a surfer, shooting a tube, and that the tunnel goes on forever and ever.

Then imagine you are back in the Eixample (Extension) neighborhood, standing at the foot of a sky-poking temple adorned with apostles and fruit, crosses and gargoyles -- a crusted castle that could be a thousand years old but is still a work in progress, with stonemasons and crane operators and contractors scurrying up scaffolding beneath eerie, spindly spires. Gaudí's Sagrada Familia (Holy Family) church looks like something out of "The Lord of the Rings" -- real in its own world, but here, on Earth? Gaudí, a devout Catholic who was killed by a tram while crossing the street in 1926, began work on his religious masterpiece in 1882. With enough public funding, the church may be completed by 2030.

Views from Sagrada's bell towers are dizzying, but ascending and descending a couple of hundred spiraling stone steps works up a hunger. We had quickly adjusted to the leisurely 2 p.m.-to-4 p.m. Spanish lunch -- long nibbles of meats and salads, breads and cheese and fruits, and half-liters of rioja, all costing less than $13.50 and leading right into that precious midday nap. But after Sagrada, we decided to splurge on lunch at Los Caracoles, a landmark 1835 restaurant off Las Ramblas.

I don't do "los caracoles" -- snails. But I do eat roast chicken, and a half-dozen plump brown fatties were steaming in the windows as we were escorted in, past the kitchen where paellas in squid ink burbled on the open grill. We took a table downstairs, past blackened wine barrels and bustling older waiters who must have spent a lifetime perfecting the art of the order. The dark-stained walls were decorated with oil paintings, pictures of opera singers, and mirrors everywhere. Overhead hung haunches of cured hams, ropes of garlic and heavy chandeliers. It felt as if King Ferdinand II had eaten here, toasting the successful launch of the Pinta, the Niña and the Santa Maria.

The half-chicken was juicy, delicious. As for the pitcher of sangria, I'm convinced there is no bad wine in Spain, whatever you do with it. And you can get a fine bottle for $7 or $8. This, after all, is a city taken over in 218 B.C. by Romans who drank, on average, a pint of wine a day -- though their blends often included honey and herbs and a subtle splash of saltwater.

A Big Dose of Madness

By midweek, we had a quarter of our must-see attractions checked off and a handful of nightclubs under our belt. It was time to unwind in Cadaques, with its red-tile roofs and whitewashed walls leading down to the sea.

Cadaques, close by the Spanish-French border, is about a 2 1/2 -hour drive from Barcelona, and it's packed in high season. But we were early, and we found the old fishing village and artists' haunt in a sweet, sleepy, seductive spring mood.

We wandered its long seawall, sucking up the fresh salt air and watching bright-blue fishing boats bob at anchor, then walked up skinny, steep cobbled side streets to a lovely little church begun in the 16th century, Eglisia de Santa Maria, where the Virgin of Hope was attended by the patron saints of the Impossible and the Storms. Down another side street, I found the little Musee Cadaques, with a photo display of Dali at his home in Port Lligat, a short hike away. There, in a labyrinthine house adorned with giant white eggs, the artist who once said, "I don't take drugs. I am drugs," entertained poets, filmmakers and artists with experimental "happenings" in the '60s and '70s.

Dali's mustachioed visage was everywhere in Cadaques: in graffiti on stucco walls, inside frames in seaside boutiques, across the face of one of his restaurant hangouts, El Baracco. Our hotel, Hotel Residencia, was an indoor shrine to the surrealist. Weird mirrors morphed on walls, mannequins had lamps for arms, and books on Dali covered every surface.

Still, we didn't see the master's mind unleashed until we drove into his nearby home town of Figueres to the Teatro-Museo Dali, where the artist lies buried in a crypt beneath a grand geodesic cupola. The mad sweep of his work was staggering. He experimented with hologram portraits, room installations, Rube Goldberg-like contraptions. He repainted Dutch still lifes and created masterful Michelangelo-esque frescoes with boggling new perspective. He riffed on Picasso and Cézanne, Mondrian and Matisse, and experimented with photography and stereoscopy.

He broke all the rules, then put them back together to suit his fancy -- something, I mused as we headed back to Barcelona, that must be endemic to this northeastern corner of the country.

Don't Stop the Music

When we returned to "Barnca," we had three days left to pack it in.

We spent one of them at Fundacio Joan Miró, whisked by funicular up the Montjuic hill to the high-ceilinged, light-filled museum. Miró's abstract moons and stars, birds and stick-figure humans flew across canvas, loose and loopy. Our next day was devoted to the Maritime Museum, housed inside beautifully restored royal shipyards that date to the 13th century. Beneath its scores of flying buttresses, ancient shipwrights cut sails, braided rope and formed great ribs of war galleys.

Tours of the magnificent music hall Palau de la Musica Catalona were sold out, so we did the next logical thing: Bought tickets for an evening performance with a popular singer who, we were assured, was "magnifico." She wasn't, not even close. But it was worth the chance to revel in the ornate splendor of the hall, with its huge mosaic columns, a chandelier that seems to describe the sun, and flying 3-D Pegasuses that burst from the wall, their hooves pawing the air.

After the limpid New Age pop, I was longing for some real music. At midnight, in the Barri Gotic, we slid into the Harlem Jazz Club, a kick-back place with live jazz, blues, flamenco, fusion, reggae and African music on the menu. We hit it on folk night, with a talented acoustic guitar duo that covered Sting, Van Morrison and Dylan, adding playful tempos, Spanish riffs and Catalan vocal runs up the melodic scale. When the duo broke into a lively rendition of Bob Marley's "No Woman, No Cry," the whole house, all ages, all languages, joined in.

We were in for one more Barnca-fest. Our final night, we hit an African music festival at the Bikini Night Club. The star was Nino Galissa, a songwriter from Guinea-Bissau who makes melodic magic on a stringed kora almost as long as he is tall. The audience stood, then moved, then collectively grooved to the gathering world beats of the kora, guitars, bongos.

As we rocked out, I thought about leaving this wild city by the sea. My mind wound 'round with images of earth tunnels, flowing metal, horned devils, giant eggs, buildings covered in scales, mannequins with lamps for arms.

Then the lights came on. I wiped the sweat off my face and looked at my Swatch.

2:30 a.m. And I wasn't a bit tired.

M.L. Lyke last wrote for Travel about winging it on vacation.