The moment in 1872 when the first tram line was inaugurated in Barcelona was very Mediterranean: sunny and suffocatingly hot. It couldn’t be any other way: it was five in the afternoon on June 27. It was going from Drassanes to Lesseps and passing through the Rambla. The model had been provided by the British company Geo Starbuck. The vehicle traveled with four metal wheels on rails and pulled by two horses or mules. It had two levels; the upper and uncovered floor was called the imperial. The feminization matched that of the newest transport system: the tram. The Royal Academy ended up imposing masculinization and Castilianization: the tram.
The image it offered, I insist, was most Mediterranean, with the row of seats oriented laterally facing the landscape. It was very attractive to enjoy the urban panorama in this way, a kind of precedent for the tourist style.
It had to seduce the pioneers of the cinematographic camera. Ricardo de Baños did not resist grabbing it and just by placing himself in the driver’s cabin he achieved a documentary so spectacular that it deserved a formidable success: it consisted of capturing what happened during the entire journey . It was 1908.
It deserves to be mentioned that it was studied to prohibit women from accessing the imperial; it is not necessary to be well-thought-out and suspect that it was a matter of avoiding falls when they went up and down the demonic staircase, since they intended, instead, to avoid lewd glances at the ankles, because higher up was impossible.
Then another very nice model appeared: the planter, a popular and most justified name. It featured completely open sides and served every bonanza month. It was a delight to enjoy the “street” ventilation, not Carrier, during the summer heat.
The magisterial pen of the journalist Gaziel at the service of the memoirist writer evoked with a manifest affection the emotion that the gardener’s show gave him when he was a child, as if it were a real attraction.
In Barcelona, ??which is so Mediterranean, the imperial and the garden were a good and reasonable lesson in how to take advantage of a friendly climate. Even the older ones enjoyed it in this sense.
