Unknown Barcelona

Most peo­ple do not re­alise that when pass­ing by Estació de França in Barcelona they are walk­ing on what, hun­dreds of years ago, was an is­land called Ma­ians. It was ac­tu­ally more of an islet lo­cated 300 me­tres out­side the Me­dieval city wall. In the 14th cen­tury, con­struc­tion on the city's port led to the de­ci­sion to con­nect the is­land with the main­land. This is how the small penin­sula upon which the dis­trict of Barceloneta came into ex­is­tence.

This is just one in­ter­est­ing fact in a new book by jour­nal­ist and writer, David Izquierdo. Cu­rioses històries de Barcelona, pub­lished by Lli­bre­ria Uni­ver­sitària, con­tains 33 short sto­ries about the Cata­lan cap­i­tal, in­clud­ing facts, leg­ends and mys­ter­ies, all lit­tle known by many city res­i­dents.

“It is a book for every­one and it has no other aim than di­rectly bring­ing peo­ple in­ter­est­ing his­to­ries that are not well known,” says the Barcelona writer. Izquierdo main­tains that Cu­rioses històries de Barcelona is not a guide­book, but rather a way of awak­en­ing the cu­rios­ity of read­ers so that they then go on to find out more about the sto­ries that in­ter­est them. The book went on sale in No­vem­ber and by Jan­u­ary had sold 1,500 copies of its first edi­tion. In Feb­ru­ary, a sec­ond edi­tion of 2,000 copies was pub­lished.

Cu­rioses històries de Barcelona is di­vided into three parts. The first, which tells of mys­ter­ies and leg­ends, be­gins with a story re­lated to the moun­tain of Tibid­abo. Specif­i­cally, with its name be­cause, ac­cord­ing to Izquierdo, tibi dabo is “a di­a­bol­i­cal phrase” that comes from the Latin for “I will give you”. The story goes that some monks named the moun­tain in the 16th cen­tury after the episode in the life of Jesus when Satan tempts him in the desert. This sec­tion also in­cludes the case of En­ri­queta Martí, known as the Raval vam­pire , for ex­am­ple. The ar­chi­tect An­toni Gaudí also stars in one of the his­to­ries. In 1926, he was run over by tram and it seems no one came to his aid be­cause they thought he was a tramp. The ar­chi­tect died a few days later. In the sec­ond sec­tion, the book of­fers read­ers his­tor­i­cal de­tails about the city, such as the fact that dur­ing Roman times it was ac­claimed for its oys­ters. The final sec­tion deals with his­to­ries about every­day Barcelona and de­tails, for ex­am­ple, the great snow­fall of 1962, on Santa Eulàlia's day, “the for­got­ten pa­tron”, and
the pa­tron of Barça.

“Be­tween 2005 and 2012, I lived out­side Barcelona and that made me see it from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive and dis­cover things that I never saw when I lived there,” says the au­thor. In fact, in 2010, Izquierdo de­cided to start work on a first novel, Tots els noms de Barcelona (Stoker Books), which was pub­lished in 2012. In work­ing on the novel, he began learn­ing about sto­ries that sur­prised him and, once pub­lished, he began ex­plain­ing these sto­ries on the radio for Onda Cero. The next step was to write the his­to­ries down and thus Cu­rioses històries de Barcelona was born.