The Sagrada Família, under slow construction, a temple of colossal monumentality and stamped with a power and great originality revealing the breath and courage of modern Catalan architecture”. With this prose so typical of the time, Manuel Folch i Torras, then general secretary of the Societat d’Atracció de Forasters de Barcelona, ??presented visitors to the Catalan capital with a scathing review of the new icon of the city, which was slowly growing in a space still full of undeveloped estates. In this Yearbook of the City 1924-1925 published by the institution created in 1908, a very distant antecedent of Turisme de Barcelona, ??the expiatory temple designed by Gaudí did not yet occupy, not by a long shot, this prominent place that globalization and the impetuous advance of the works of the basilica are currently awarded to what is, in competition with the Alhambra of Granada, the most visited monument in Spain and one of the most Instagrammed in the world.
The yearbook of the Societat d’Atracció de Forasters, as well as the tourist guides that were published from the beginning of the 20th century with the intention of selling abroad the excellence of an incipient Barcelona brand, barely they included references to this new cathedral erected at a time when large religious buildings were already a thing of the past. These pages were mainly recreated in the charms of old Barcelona, ??its churches, its great civil buildings… and its excellent hotels.
“You only have to observe what happens to the wealthy tourist who visits Barcelona for the first time. He arrives tired of all the things in the world, serious, grumpy, waiting for the opportunity to point out the most insignificant deficiency. But suddenly the windows of the room are thrown wide open for him and the moment he finds himself in front of the immensity of the purest blue sky, transparent, sweet, nothing like the gray sky of the northern countries, nor the dazzling light of the Orientals, which blinds and stuns, cannot conceal a smile of satisfaction”. It cannot be denied that Miguel Regás, president a hundred years ago of the Association of Hoteliers de Catalunya, knew how to sell his product.
In this Barcelona that looked with some disbelief at the first pinnacles of the Sagrada Família, convinced that the works would last forever, it was already betting on business tourism, the same reason why the current rulers of the city sigh. The cover of the aforementioned yearbook of Barcelona’s pioneering tourism promotion agency already marked the line to follow when it proclaimed that this city “great in its history and in its progress, a financial, industrial and commercial metropolis, is of the same interest to tourist than the businessman”. For this reason, the same pages that ignored the Sagrada Família were filled with advertisements – what an advertising festival! – of hotels, restaurants, spas (the Societat d’Atracció de Forasters de Barcelona extended the promotional focus to a good number of tourist attractions from the rest of Catalonia), banks and financial institutions, wineries, shops and the most varied industrial sectors.
The Barcelona of this slow-growing Sagrada Família allowed itself to be seduced by a modernity associated with the automobile. “Barcelona, ??motoring city par excellence”, titled one of its chapters in the 1924-1925 publication, which put the ratio of cars at one for every 50 inhabitants, “a promising number that allows us to hope, for a not-distant date , the day when each individual will have their car as they currently have their umbrella”.
The slow pace of work on the Sagrada Família in the mid-twenties of the last century contrasted with the accelerated pulse experienced by the city on the eve of the International Exhibition of 1929. The city’s tourism promoters, eager to show the world “the ‘enlargement of Barcelona’ and its urban improvements placed the evolution of the metro on the highest pedestal. At the end of 1924, the stretch of the Gran Metropolità had been inaugurated, between Plaça Catalunya and Lesseps, and in this tourist yearbook the unstoppable progress of the Transversal metro was glossed over in all kinds of detail.
“The people of Barcelona can be proud – it was stated in this document from a hundred years ago – of this fever that germinates projects and more projects and raises companies for their execution and attracts men from all towns to convert them quickly in splendid realities”.
