Barcelona: A city that aims for the stars

I MOVED to Barcelona three years ago. There is something very atmospheric about the city.

“It is,” as Spain’s best-selling novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón said, “like a haunted house. The Spanish Civil War is still hanging there. It’s like a smell that’s fading away but when I was a kid, even in the 1970s, even if you didn’t know anything about it, there was a feeling: ‘What the hell happened here?’ It’s something in the air,” he said, inhaling deeply. “It’s like going to Berlin.”

His novel The Shadow of the Wind is an ideal companion to bring with you on a visit to the city. Its pages reek of the Gothic Quarter and the other labyrinthine streets which make up the old part of Barcelona, whose architecture includes Roman ruins amidst its defining medieval splendour.