Reclaim your heritage

In line with my vow to write only pos­i­tive words in this col­umn hence­forth, this month’s re­flec­tions at­tempt to con­tinue with the theme of pos­i­tive con­se­quences emerg­ing from the cur­rent cri­sis. Clearly, these are test­ing times for every­one, and it is there­fore more im­por­tant than ever to ac­cen­tu­ate the pos­i­tive and count our bless­ings. This came eas­ily to me the other day when I in­sti­gated a new health regime with my son to get us fit, after months of lock­down had left us both in less than op­ti­mal shape. There are no ex­cuses here, plenty of peo­ple have man­aged to re­main in shape de­spite the re­stric­tions, by ex­er­cis­ing at home, walk­ing for miles around their rooftops, etc. but in our case a com­bi­na­tion of fac­tors meant we just hadn’t been look­ing after our­selves phys­i­cally.

So what does the new regime in­volve? Well we eat health­ily enough, so no real changes there, it was just a case of mak­ing sure we get some daily ex­er­cise. And this is where I can count my bless­ings, be­cause my near­est park hap­pens to be Parc Güell, and as many of you will know, parts of it that were pre­vi­ously by paid visit only now have open ac­cess to lo­cals, even if the au­thor­i­ties are tak­ing the op­por­tu­nity to do plenty of re­fur­bish­ing while the tourists are away.

My first walk up there with my son was rev­e­la­tory – even though I’ve been walk­ing there reg­u­larly in re­cent times, I had not been al­lowed to pass through the afore­men­tioned pay areas and there­fore had com­pletely for­got­ten just how spec­tac­u­lar and unique that part of the park is. There’s no point in me try­ing to wax lyri­cal about Gaudi’s columns, arches and ce­ramic sculp­tures here, as read­ers will be all too fa­mil­iar with them, but it is worth me em­pha­sis­ing the pure glo­ri­ous sen­sa­tion of walk­ing alone around this fab­u­lous ar­chi­tec­tural tri­umph, some­thing nei­ther I nor my son are ever likely to be able to do again just a few short weeks from now. We took the time to stop and ad­mire the ce­ramic struc­tures, from the walls to the dec­o­ra­tive mo­tifs to the world-renowned sala­man­der it­self, al­beit from a dis­tance due to the work being car­ried out. And the whole ex­pe­ri­ence re­minded me of what it was like when I first vis­ited Barcelona in 1990, be­fore you had to queue up and pay to get in, be­fore you had to lis­ten to end­less tourist chat­ter­ing and tour guide in­struc­tions. I was a tourist my­self back then, of course, and jeal­ous that any­one could have this as their local park. So much so that I re­turned five years later and made it my own local park, or at least one I could visit when­ever I liked.

One mes­sage I now be­lieve these often be­wil­der­ing times should have reaf­firmed for many peo­ple, and not just those who live in Barcelona, but those any­where over­run by tourists, is that we are no longer able to enjoy the beauty that sur­rounds us, be­cause we have sold it. Which doesn’t seem like a very pos­i­tive re­flec­tion after all, un­less we some­how learn lessons from it for the fu­ture and find ways of re­claim­ing the local her­itage we can no longer enjoy, some­thing I have very much been en­cour­ag­ing my Barcelona-born son to do.