The City Homage To BARCELONA

"You can fall in love, or at least into some kind of infatuation, with Barcelona. But not everyone finds the course of the affair smooth, for as the Spanish historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto recently wrote in his short history ; of the city, "like one of those tryingly beautiful and energetic women whom all men are able to identify among their acquaintances, she can excite passion only for short periods." It can be a confusing place for those who expect the stereotype of tourist Spain -- flamenco, bullfights, serenades under the moonlit balcony. It is a gritty city, crowded, with brusque street manners, a high crime rate, a seemingly ineradicable drug problem and some of the worst traffic in Europe. Romantic Spain it is not. But it evokes an extreme, sometimes even delirious, attachment.

Barcelona is and always has been a place of industry. In fact, for most of the 19th century it was the only industrial city in Spain, a sort of Mediterranean Manchester raised to wealth on cotton, silk and metal, presided over by a triumphant bourgeoisie and racked by working-class (especially anarchist) rebellion. Catalans are archetypally producers rather than dreamers, and they tend to pride themselves on what they call seny, common sense raised almost to the level of a theological virtue. They like you to know they have molta feina, a work overload. They do not see themselves or their capital as picturesque; that they leave to the Andalusians. Barcelona is no more like Seville or Granada than Milan is like Naples.

How is one to approach this teeming, impacted port that Joan Maragall, Barcelona's greatest turn-of-the-century poet and grandfather of the city's present mayor, Pasqual Maragall, called la gran encisera -- the great enchantress? Only in terms of its own history -- one not always shared with the rest of Spain, and often in opposition to it. Barcelona is a very old city, founded by the Romans late in the 1st century B.C.; their massive walls, topped by medieval additions, still encircle its core.

It was not, to begin with, an important town; the Roman capital of what is now Catalunya was farther south, at Tarragona. But Barcelona began to gain significance after the Roman Empire collapsed and the invading Visigoths took over, and it became a capital in the 9th century A.D., when Charlemagne's heirs conquered the city port, threw out the Arabs who had taken charge of it as the northern extension of the Arab conquest of Spain, and then in effect turned it over to a Catalan strongman, Wilfred the Hairy, the semilegendary founder of the Catalan state.

From then on, Catalans ran Catalunya, and Barcelona, for themselves. They were jealous of their independence and determined to sustain their own laws ; and language. From the 13th century through the 15th, their outward thrust created a Mediterranean trading empire that stretched from the coast of North Africa to the gates of Byzantium. With the money this brought home, a city grew: the greatest Spanish city of the Middle Ages. Even today the Barri Gotic, or Old City, of Barcelona, facing the port, contains in its winding alleys more functioning Gothic structures than any other such enclave in Europe.