Jaume I of Aragó was one of Barcelona’s many notable figures. Descended from French and Byzantine nobility, his exotic origins were matched by an illustrious childhood spent in the thick of the Occitan struggles.

The thirteenth was the century in Europe that instigated the beginnings of a consolidation of power from which Jaume would personally profit and which in the long term would synthesise many of the nation states we know today.

During his reign however, Jaume strived hard for independence. His county of Barcelona, for example, which had been endowed four centuries earlier by Charlemagne, he divested properly and finally from France.

He also invaded the Balearics, wresting control from the Moorish taifas, and established a close relationship between the islands and the mainland that endures today. Power gains over the Moors characterised the remainder of Jaume’s reign as he pushed them ever further into Andalusia.

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Barcelona

The Catalonian capital is full of quirks: a city that's noisy, bright and always in a hurry to be somewhere.

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History piled on top of history

Step out of the metro station that carries his name, slip into the streets nearby and perhaps you can imagine how Jaume’s Barcelona appeared…

The tall Roman city walls cast long shadows over the rooftops of markets, workshops and houses jumbled together and scored by narrow alleyways.

There might be the distant chant of Jewish prayer. A synogogue stands taller, its additional height permitted by Jaume. Those who come here are sometimes persecuted yet generally tolerated, though not for much longer.

Meanwhile the masons are working on the lower walls of the new cathedral. As their mallets hammer out time, they’ll be finished – two hundred years hence – right when the Catholic Kings ride into Granada and Columbus discovers the New World.

Every building screens off or builds on some already forgotten landmark. History piled on top of history. Daylight gets in between the cracks for only an hour or two each day, but at least the suffering heat does not.

Eccentrics welcome

Barcelona has had its fair share of eccentrics.

Picasso and Miró were lauded, Dalí was banned and Gaudí lambasted.

And whilst the artists all died famous and respected, the architect went almost unrecognised, run over by a tram before the city suddenly appreciated his genius.

It’s not difficult to understand Barcelona’s earlier allergic reactions. Not only did Gaudí present something completely unprecedented, he often freely mixed it with architectural styles more rigidly defined by time and example.

Sagrada Família perfectly embodies this fervent eclecticism. Still under construction today and planned rather optimistically for completion in 2026 (the centenary of Gaudi’s death), the church remains enigmatically bizarre even to modern tastes. It is nevertheless the very symbol of this city now, released from the strictures of Franco and a degraded regional economy, a time in which aesthetically anything goes.

Knowing me, knowing you

This visit did not reveal the cosy, colourful Barcelona of my imagination. That was the Barcelona of my student years, a kind of Pot Luck meets Together, open and accessible at the other end of a rainbow, by a flight I could never seem to afford – if only because the destination never existed.

Everything there was incense sticks and painted furniture. A quick-tempered latina with whom to fall in and out of love by the hours on a clock. Orwell and Hemingway smoking cigars in an empty lobby. Gossiping starlings and morning laundry, the feverish, silent repose of hot afternoons and all-night festas in a barri I could call my own.

That’s not Barcelona. That studenty, too-good-to-be-true idyll, you break up with it and of course it gets on perfectly fine without you.

The clock strikes midday on your affair with the tempestuous latina of your post-pubescent imagination. And you wake up in the thick heat with a headache and that maddening truth, the one that never comes out right: it’s not you, it’s me…

• René Weis
• Penguin (first published 2001)
• 

The Inquisition weighs heavily in our modern impressions of an era in which cruelty, intolerance and ignorance reigned supreme for several centuries. Yet a growing body of academic research into the Catholic suppression of the “heretical” Cathar faith now demonstrates with no small irony the sophistication of a highly developed subculture thriving around the uplands of Lombardy, Catalonia and Pyrennean France.

Thanks to the rich detail contained in depositions from two extant Inquisition registers, René Weis here offers readers an insight into life in the village of Montaillou and the Cathar heartland, according to the testimony of its residents. Montaillou may well be, as the author suggests, the best known village in Medieval Europe. Never shy of expounding on his personal sleuthing around the quiet backwaters of modern France, Weis is clearly fascinated by his subject. Equally, the wealth of the material and the complexity of the family histories would be an exciting, if daunting, challenge for any author of popular history. Nevertheless, Weis somehow manages to totally dessicate the stories of intrigue, vendetta, virtue and ambition like tomatoes in the sun.

Much has been written of the Cathars in this genre, in part because modern readers are understandably attracted to perceptions of “enlightened” liberality in a time of oppressive dogma. Weis responds to such sweeping generalisations with a pedestrian, repetitive and chronologically uneven exposition, as if the switchback style of his manuscript source rubbed off on him. The Yellow Cross qualifies easily as history, but it’s hardly popular.

Now let’s get one thing straight: Girona is a city in Catalonia. It is not in Italy – if you think that, you’re crossing Genoa and Verona and you’re getting Gerona (sic).

J and I visited Girona last week, right before my 28th birthday, for the 3rd Caixa Sabadell Etnival, a free world music mini-festival held in the city.

Our sojourn was a double-header: part city visit, part gig trip.

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Girona

Between the Costas and Barca, a beautiful and modest city and a great little festival.

3rd Caixa Sabadell Etnival 2007

Seeing Girona was only one half of the reason J and I were in this attractive city.

The Catalan savings bank Caixa Sabadell has organised a small, free world music festival in Girona for the last couple of years.

The festival is called the Caixa Sabadell Etnival and took place over three days in June, this being the third edition, held in the Parc de les Ribes del Ter between the River Ter and the fringe of the city’s Fontajau district.

Information about the Etnival was scarce apart from a nice website put up by the Caixa Sabadell, which was still pretty helpful despite my Latin-informed appreciation of Castilian Spanish and guess-standard Catalan.

Despite two editions of the Etnival in 2005 and 2006, nobody seems to have written on the subject at any length. So I hope this will set an English language precedent: we were there in 2007!

Of the bands and artists billed to appear, we caught up with Macaco and 08001 on the Friday night.

On the long, hot Saturday afternoon, we enjoyed an upbeat set from Gertrudis and the trancy, ethnic Nómhadas before retiring like softies for a bit of a siesta.

On our return in the evening, there were two ripping sets from the marvellous Patriarcas de la Rumba and Sargento Garcia (more commonly known as Sergent Garcia in his native France).

We rounded off Sunday with the highlight of the weekend, and the main driver behind why we were there in the first place: the legendary Toumani Diabaté and the Symmetric Orchestra, making their appearance in the middle of a long European tour whose UK dates are all somewhat difficult to reach for us.

Actually seeing Toumani in Catalonia was much easier, believe me!

The Etnival was quite well attended, though numbers never swelled to completely fill the available area.

However whilst the crowds were therefore relatively small (with the notable exception of the Macaco appearance on Friday night), it did mean that the queues for the bar and toilets were mercifully short.

It could take a few more years and the introduction of a bit of vegetarian catering before the Etnival establishes itself enough to attract a bigger crowd.

Confidence does seem to be growing though: this year’s headliners warranted much bigger type sizes on the poster!

Of course, it would also be great to see the continuing development of the Etnival as a free event. Let’s hope the Caixa Sabadell continues to back it.

The city

Since that champion of cheapness Ryanair began flying to Girona, the city’s small airport some way out of town has swollen to accommodate close to 4 million passengers per year, an 800% increase in the last decade.

Yet few of these passengers actually visit Girona itself. To some, you see, the airport is known as “Girona Costa Brava” whilst to others it’s more familiar as “Girona Barcelona”. And it’s one of these ‘bigger’ attractions for which most passengers are bound once they metamorphose like some indelicate breed of butterfly into Brits abroad.

Just a small number of inquisitive travellers crosses over to the solitary, lonely bus stop opposite those signed for Lloret De Mar and Barcelona. From this joyless outpost the intrepid head downtown.

What these chancers will discover is an extraordinarily beautiful medieval city, compact and peaceful and full of wonderful ice creams in all flavours.

Occasionally the odd loudmouth ignoramus and three generations of his rolled gold Essex dynasty rumbles in for a bit of culcha before the haul home – souring your quiet tapas lunch on the Plaça de l’Independencia – but such cretinous infestations are thankfully rare.

In common with most great Iberian cities, Girona’s long history is tied to religion and siege. Needless to say, the Romans woz ere first, replaced by the Moors and then a co-existing Christian and Jewish population from the early tenth century onwards.

The Jewish enclave in the city was particularly well established, becoming a centre for the study of Kabbala, before the Jews were expelled in the late 15th century by the Catholic kings. The Jewish influence is still in evidence today throughout that part of town known as the Call.

Girona is one of those cities in which every corner you turn gives way to some new and frequently unusual sight.

From finely crafted door handles to lavish funeral parlours, from creepy shop displays to colourful markets, from trompes l’oeil to trainers hanging from wires, Girona is chock full of profound, fleeting images.

Contrasting with the dry plains of Castile and the hot mountains and plateaux of the Sierra Nevada, Catalonia is a green region in the shadow of the Pyrenees.

In Girona, there are several beautiful gardens, including the Alemanys and the Parc de la Devesa, in which a long avenue of plane trees called the Plaça de les Botxes can be found. There was an impressive range of restaurants. J and I counted Chinese, Indian, Thai, French, Basque, Catalan and even that rarest of exotic cuisines in Iberia: vegetarian.

So next time you’re passing by on your way to Barca or the Costas, why not drop in on Girona?

J and I visited the venerable Catalonian city of Valencia on the eastern coast of the Iberian peninsula.

The city is an unusually harmonious mix of old and new: the ciutat vella (old city) is all cobbles and charm, whilst Santiago Calatrava’s extraordinary buildings rise up towards the sea, distinctive against a cloudless sky, white on blue.

Spring was still blossoming in the trees but the city was already getting hotter, with temperatures hitting eighty plus degrees. So even if the younger generation of Valencians increasingly works to European hours, there’s still much to be said for an afternoon siesta in some shady spot away from the dusty streets.

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Valencia

Catalunya's second city, Valencia packs narrow streets with history and character.

Valencia seems to be a city of successions. A hotbed of sedition in Roman times, Catalonia’s second great power was overrun by Visigoths and subsequently fought over by the Moors and the Christians who first reconquered Valencia under El Cid in 1094, then conclusively under James I of Aragon in 1238.

Valencia prospered in the centuries that followed, financing Columbus’ fateful expedition of 1492 before once more becoming the scene of prolonged fighting during the monarchic and imperial wars that tore across Spain in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Taking flight

J and I flew to Valencia out of East Midlands Airport over the May Day Holiday, courtesy of the dreadfully shabby but sickeningly cheap Ryanair.

At the other end, the sun was out and the temperatures climbing. We stayed in the Hotel Venecia whose principal advantage is its marvellous location on the Plaza Ayuntamiento.

View from the top

After the drag of flying, I obviously couldn’t resist getting up among the clouds again, this time scaling the near 300 steps of El Micalet, the stout tower of Santa Maria’s Catedral de València in breathless, bounding steps that I would later regret.

The view was practically worth it. No, it really was and I found myself drawing comparisons with the lofty heights of the Duomo Campanile in Florence.

In an oft-neglected spot off to the side of the Catedral’s nave is the chapel of Santo Caliz, in which there is one of those irresistable is-it-isn’t-it relics of the Catholic Church: the Holy Grail. We stumbled in on a religious ceremony there, but there was still enough space to sidle in and catch a glimpse of what could have inspired all those colourful legends and the odd Hollywood movie.

Down in the streets

All that climbing was thirsty work. J and I repaired to the Orxateria El Siglo for a glass of Orxata (or “Horchata” in Castellano).

It’s easy to get lost in the backstreets of Valencia’s ciutat vella, the Old Quarter. There’s a unique scene on every corner, from the Caballeros to the Barrio Del Carmen. Students meeting up for drinks, colourful graffiti, grumpy old folks arguing loudly.

In the quiet of a late afternoon, when locals are in siesta, we came across the Plaza Redondo almost by chance, as you do with most Valencian landmarks.

It was difficult to imagine that just hours earlier, the din of thousands of songbirds would have filled the air, for this is where winged warblers from around the world are bought and sold.

When evening drew in, we tended to roost at the Cafe Sant Jaume at one end of the Caballeros, drinking dobles of beer and trying to make ourselves heard over the customary Iberian racket.

From the cafe back to the Plaza Ayuntamiento, we walked down the Bolseria and the Plaza Mercato.

The latter area is home to several distinguished buildings, in particular the Mercado Central and the fabulous Lonja de la Seda, a former silk traders’ exchange turned UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Opposite the Lonja is yet another of the numerous churches dedicated to Saint Mary.

The story goes that children who were brought here were told to look up at the weather vane for a period of time. When finally they allowed their gaze to return to the street, their parents would be gone and responsibility for their welfare had passed to the church.

In the Mercado Central, the stalls buzz with activity as Valencians go about their daily food shopping. On display are the usual oranges and olives, but here you can also find such exotic fare as dried bonito.

20,000 leagues under the sea… with 20,000 kids

As Giles Tremlett warns in his superb Ghosts of Spain, kids are the most important figures in Spanish society. Indeed, though the ghosts of Napoleon’s army had long since been expelled from the Valencian gates, the irritant spirit of the diminutive dictator is alive and well in the city’s little bundles of joy.

Down at the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències, the modern architectural marvel designed by Valencia’s very own Santiago Calatrava, the new aquarium complex L’Oceanogràfic was rammed with what seemed like most of the city’s clamouring little wretches.

While their parents flouted the rules by dazzling the poor fish with flash photography, tomorrow’s leaders of Catalonia hollered and scampered their way through every display. The awesome sight of beautiful white beluga or creepy Japanese Giant Spider Crabs couldn’t hush them.

We had to put the undignified cacophony down to the sort of cultural divide that even Calatrava’s splendid Alameda bridge couldn’t straddle.

Another example of cultural divides might explain the inspired menu at the aquarium’s self-serve restaurant. The majority of dishes on offer were fish.