I look at the four-inch heels with the red soles like someone looking at a platypus. “If heaven exists, these ‘stilettos’ will be waiting for you at the same pearly gates,” says the advertising of the Louboutin house about his fetish footwear: the pair costs 700 euros ala. Both paradise and the beautiful court shoes can now sit and wait. On tiptoe, I leave the store, at number 97 Passeig de Gràcia, and I resume my walk shyly, like a hen in a foreign pen, like Paco Martínez Soria in ‘The city is not for me’. The Barcelona avenue has become a huge ‘showroom’ for luxury brands—Chanel, Gucci, Dior, Jimmy Choo—, peppered here and there by the architectural whims of modernism. A giant showcase for melting rubles, yuan and petrodollars.
A study by the real estate consultancy Cushman & Wakefield places Passeig de Gràcia as the most expensive street in Spain in terms of rentals of commercial premises: 3,000 euros per square meter per year, a figure that represents an increase of 9% compared to 2022. It has therefore surpassed the Serrano Street in Madrid (2,940 euros), the main artery of the Salamanca neighborhood. At the same time, below, at the beach level, the ‘house quarters’, 30 meter apartments without elevator, They already cost about 1,300 euros per month. The Barceloneta, A traditional neighborhood of fishermen and humble immigrants, it has risen as the district with the most expensive square meter of rent in Spain, while longtime residents have had to leave due to the implosion of rents. From record to record.
Babylonian wonder
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In the 1930s, at the time of gunmanism, Josep Maria de Sagarra he complained, from his column in the weekly ‘Mirador’, of the exponential and disorderly growth of Barcelona, ”an imponderable wonder of a Babylonian character”, observed from Tibidabo or Montjuïc. He praised the city of 100 years ago, newly expanded from the old walls, when the rondas were fields where idyllic carrots and silver artichokes grew. The tomato plants shone in the two ‘eixamples’. What would the poet say today about falafel and flip-flop tourism?
Looking back always stains the analysis with sticky melancholy, but What is happening in the Catalan capital destroys the Olympic myth, the truth of “a hegemonic narrative according to which the only possible path is constant growth,” he writes Pedro Bravo in ‘Excess baggage’. The unkempt tourism empties the cities of meaning. In Venice, in the Morelli pharmacy, near the Rialto bridge, the illuminated counter that updates daily continues to flash the number of Venetians resisting in the center of The Serenissima: There are already less than 50,000.