The City Homage To BARCELONA

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Catalan Gothic is austere, primal, bony architecture, nowhere near as decorated as French or English. Its grandeur is all in the structure, and no building displays this more piercingly than the 14th century church of Santa Maria del Mar, the "workers' church" of Barcelona, with its sublimely plain interior, a solemn Sequoia grove of stone hewed from the quarries of Montjuic, the mountain that guards the port.

Barcelona's democratic traditions and sense of independence go back to the Middle Ages. There were menestrals -- shopkeepers and artisans -- on the Consell de Cent, or Council of One Hundred, the governing body of the city, in the 13th century. The city's charter of citizens' rights, the Usatges, or Usages, predates the Magna Carta by a century. And the Catalans' sense of otherness -- the separation, cultural and institutional, from the rest of Spain -- comes through loud and clear in the oath of allegiance their leaders swore to the Aragonese kings in the 15th century: "We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than us, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided that you observe all our liberties and laws -- but if not, not." Catalans have always waxed lyrical over their medieval defiance of kingship and railed against "centralism" -- rule by Madrid. Their political history is one long rebuke to the dominant ideology of Europe: that of the nation-state that subsumes and represses cultural differences within it.

Traditionally, the rallying point of the Catalans is their language -- "our ancient, melodious and abundant tongue," as the 19th century poet Joaquim Rubio i Ors put it -- spoken by about 6 million people today and matrix of an important national literature that goes back to the days of the troubadours. (Catalan and Provencal were sister languages, and poets writing in both moved among the courts of France and Catalunya.)

At various times since the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, Castile has tried to take Catalunya over and suppress its speech. Francisco Franco banned all publishing and teaching in Catalan, hoping to prevent his subjects from thinking separatist thoughts. But obdurately, Catalan survives, and now that separatist dreams have faded -- Jordi Pujol, the president of the autonomous region of Catalunya, dropped the separatist plank from his party's platform last October -- it is the language that remains the focus of Catalunya's enthusiasm for cultural distinction.

Barcelona did not develop smoothly. It has had three convulsive spasms of rebuilding and self-renewal, with long stretches of inertia in between. The most recent one began in the late 1970s and has been going on for the past 10 years under Barcelona's socialist Mayor Maragall: the refashioning and sprucing up of the city, from its infrastructure -- sewers, ring roads -- to the restoration of its huge deposit of historic buildings, most of which had decayed badly during the Franco years, through to new works such as the refurbished waterfront, the Olympic Village and the magnificent covered stadium on Montjuic by Arata Isozaki.

The first spurt of renewal was in the Middle Ages, creating the Gothic city. Then came a slump, as the ascendancy of Castile and the shift of trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic thrust Barcelona into a 200-year depression, from which it began to recover by industrializing only at the end of the 18th century.