Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Catalan institutions and legal systems. The Catalan language was re-adopted by the middle
and upper classes and new Catalan literature emerged as well.
In 1892 the Unió Catalanista (Catalanist Union) demanded the re-establishment of the
Corts in a document known as the
Bases de Manresa
. In 1906 the suppression of Catalan
news sheets was greeted by the formation of Solidaritat Catalana (Catalan Solidarity; a na-
tionalist movement). It attracted a broad band of Catalans, not all of them nationalists.
Perhaps the most dynamic expression of the Catalan Renaissance occurred in the world of
art. Barcelona was the home of Modernisme, Catalan art nouveau. While the rest of Spain
stagnated, Barcelona was a hotbed of artistic activity, an avant-garde base with close links to
Paris. The young Picasso spread his artistic wings here and drank in the artists' hang-out Els
Quatre Gats.
An unpleasant wake-up call came with Spain's short, futile war with the US in 1898, in
which it lost not only its entire navy, but its last colonies (Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philip-
pines). The blow to Barcelona's trade was enormous.
Many Gothic masterpieces were built in the mid-14th century, a time of great suffering in
Barcelona. When a wheat crop failed in 1333, the resulting famine killed 10,000 people (a
quarter of the city's population). In the 1340s plague devastated the city, killing four of its
five counsellers along with many others.
Mayhem
Barcelona's proletariat was growing fast. The total population grew from 115,000 in 1800 to
over 500,000 by 1900 and over one million by 1930 - boosted, in the early 19th century, by
poor immigrants from rural Catalonia and, later, from other regions of Spain. All this made
Barcelona ripe for unrest.
The city became a swirling vortex of poor workers, Republicans, bourgeois regionalists,
gangsters, police terrorists and hired
pistoleros
(gunmen). Among the underclasses, who
lived in some of the most abysmal conditions in Europe, there was a deep undercurrent of
discontent towards the upper classes, the state and the church (which had long been viewed
as an ally to the rich and powerful). When the political philosophy of anarchism began
spreading through Europe, it was embraced by many industrial workers in Barcelona, who
embarked on a road to social revolution through violent means.
One anarchist bomb at the Liceu opera house on La Rambla in the 1890s killed 22 people.
Anarchists were also blamed for the Setmana Tràgica (Tragic Week) in July 1909 when, fol-
