The Sagrada Família, under slow construction, a temple of colossal monumentality and sealed with a strength and brilliant originality that reveals the breath and bizarreness of modern Catalan architecture”.
With this prose so characteristic of the time, Manuel Folch i Torras, at that time general secretary of the Society for the Attraction of Foreigners of Barcelona, ??presented visitors to the Catalan capital with a brief overview of the new icon of the slowly growing city. in a space still full of unbuilt farms.
In that City Yearbook 1924-1925 published by the institution created in 1908, a very distant predecessor of Turisme de Barcelona, ??the expiatory temple designed by Gaudí still did not occupy, far from it, that outstanding place that globalization and the impetuous advance of The works of the basilica currently give what is, in competition with the Alhambra in Granada, the most visited monument in Spain and one of the most instagrammed in the world.
The directory of the Society for the Attraction of Foreigners, as well as the tourist guides that had been published since the beginning of the 20th century with the intention of selling abroad the excellence of an incipient Barcelona brand, barely included references to this new cathedral built at a time when that large religious buildings were a thing of the past. Those pages recreated above all the charms of old Barcelona, ??its churches, its large civil buildings… and its excellent hotels.
“It is enough 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 open wide and when he finds himself before the immensity of the purest, transparent, sweet blue sky, not at all similar to the gray sky of northern countries, nor to the dazzling light of the eastern ones, that blinds and stuns, cannot hide a satisfied smile”. Don Miguel Regás, president one hundred years ago of the Association of Hoteliers of Catalonia, must not be denied that he knew how to sell the product.
In that Barcelona that looked with some disbelief at the first pinnacles of the Sagrada Família, convinced that the works were going to last an eternity, they were already betting on business tourism, the same for which the current rulers of the city sigh. The very cover of the aforementioned yearbook of Barcelona’s pioneering tourism promotion agency already marked the line to follow by proclaiming that this city “great in its history and progress, a financial, industrial and commercial metropolis, interests the tourist as well as the Businessman”. For this reason, the same pages that ignored the Sagrada Família were filled with advertisements –what a publicity festival!- for hotels, restaurants, spas (the Barcelona Foreigners Attraction Society extended the promotional focus to a good number of tourist attractions from the rest of the world). de Catalunya), banks and financial institutions, wineries, shops and the most varied industrial sectors.
The Barcelona of that slowly growing Sagrada Família allowed itself to be seduced by a modernity associated with the automobile. “Barcelona, ??motoring city par excellence”, was the headline of one of its chapters in the 1924-1925 publication, which estimated the proportion of cars at one for every 50 inhabitants, “a promising number that allows us to hope, for a not too distant date, the day when that each individual will have his car as he currently has his umbrella”.
The slow pace of construction on the Sagrada Família in the mid-1920s contrasted with the rapid pulse that the city was experiencing on the eve of the 1929 International Exposition. The city’s tourist promoters, eager to show the world “the aggrandizement of Barcelona” and its urban improvements, placed the evolution of the metro on the highest pedestal.
At the end of 1924, the section of the Gran Metropolitano had been inaugurated, between Catalunya and Lesseps squares, and in that tourist yearbook the unstoppable advances of the Tranversal Metropolitano were glossed in great detail. “We Barcelonans can feel proud – it was stated in that document from a hundred years ago – of that fever that makes projects and more projects germinate and raises companies for their execution and attracts men from all towns to quickly turn them into splendid realities”.
