Without missing the weekly appointment with the readers, the journalist and columnist of La Vanguardia Xavi Casinos has reached the respectable figure of 500 installments of the series Barcelona secreta in the digital edition of the newspaper. Sunday’s article reaches this round number in a story that deals with via C, the avenue that at the beginning of the 20th century was supposed to cross Ciutat Vella perpendicular to Via Laietana, but was never fully executed. Casinos confesses that he had never thought of writing so many articles about the more unknown Barcelona: “I was not aware that it had been so long. I thought it would last a few months and I never imagined that I could have found so many stories”, he says.
For a decade, the writer has been uncovering the most unprecedented side of Barcelona’s history, the B side of the city, as he once defined it. When he walks the streets, where the eye of any other mortal may not be able to see, he is able not to miss the slightest detail to discover new stories. From a stone to an ancient inscription, it serves to pull the thread and uncover unknown passages of the city. For example, the information that illustrates the article. That look he captures in one of the chimneys on the roof of the Palau Güell, one of Antoni Gaudí’s architectural works, the silhouette in the form of a trencadís of Cobi, the Olympic mascot of Barcelona’92, after a restoration before the Olympics
Casinos, with extensive experience in local information, has been able to access places restricted to the general public, including the old historical archive of the Barcelona Cathedral, worthy of a scene from The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco , or the basement of the hundred-year-old Can Waldes clothing factory in Poblenou with dozens of connected rooms covered in glazed ceramic tiles that were old oil tanks. There have been more underground and almost secret spaces, such as what appears to be a platform project and stairs that now lead nowhere, in the subway tunnel under Via Laietana, between Jaume I and Urquinaona stations.
The author points out that one of the keys to success is that what he explains “exists and can be verified”. In fact, some of the articles are also located on public roads. In this sense, the ruins of a fort near the park of the Labyrinth of Horta witness to the first Carline war or an anti-tuberculosis center from the beginning of the 20th century that never came to work on the mountain of Collserola. Among his other favorite stories, the remains of the observatory on Passeig de Gràcia from where the Sputnik satellite signal was captured in a feat performed by a group of young astronomy enthusiasts or the replica of the playground of the Lions of the Alhambra in Granada in the hall of a building of Sant Gervasi.
For the readers’ peace of mind, the author still has many more stories to tell and already has some in mind, such as the so-called El Negre de la Riba, the figure on the bow of an old ship la a reproduction of which is displayed on a facade in Barceloneta and is waiting to be shown the original piece. The future of secret Barcelona is assured with his fine capacity for observation, as a great fan of Sherlock Holmes and a follower of one of his maxims: “Once the impossible is ruled out, what remains, however improbable it may seem, it must be the truth”.
