12.13.25

Dear Noah,

Ryan and I arrived in Barcelona with no plan, and we wandered four days there trying to solve the mystery of what makes this a world-famous city. Barcelona didn’t boast an impressive skyline, Spanish/Catalonian cuisine wasn’t boldly flavorful, and most Catalonian signage told us they didn’t want us there anyway. So what made this a global destination? Why did we come?

Our first instinct was to credit FC Barça with putting their city on the map, but our tickets to the game weren’t until Saturday night, so we had two days to kill before then. We’d also heard of a basilica called La Sagrada Familia, but tickets for that tour were on Sunday. Until then we couldn’t do anything else besides wander and see if the city itself could provide us with answers. 

At first look, Barcelona doesn’t appear spectacular––besides a handful of tourist sites, the buildings are squarish and uniform, the streetplan is a simple grid, and it’s not impressively vast. But in reading about the history of the city, I learned that all of this was purposeful and ingeniously designed. See, back when our mothers were kids, in the 1600s, Barcelona was the capital of an independent kingdom called Catalunya––and that kingdom eventually fell to external rulers who built walls around Barcelona and prevented it from expanding for 200 years. The population grew, but the square-mileage did not. At its peak in the 1800s, when our mothers I’d guess were entering high school, it was the most densely populated city on the planet. And with that density came illness. Tuberculosis, mostly. Life expectancy was in the twenties for Barcelona, but that didn’t dissuade the central rule in Madrid from maintaining its chokehold on the city limits. The Spanish kingdom was using the fortress walls surrounding Barcelona as a military stronghold, and any construction outside of the walls would be within ‘firing range.’ So the Catalán people slowly suffocated on the inside. Eventually Madrid wisened up and let Barcelona expand into the available land beyond the walls, right up to Mont Juic in the south and the Serra de Collserola in the northwest. 

With news of the coming expansion, the citizens had to decide what type of city they wanted to live in. There were dozens of drafts by dozens of engineers until eventually Antoni Rovira i Trias, a Catalonian architect, proposed a radial design with the Gothic Quarter at the center and avenues flowing out like rays of the sun. Concentricity was very popular in Europe at the time, so this was a clear winner. However, Madrid again exerted its influence and went with a less-popular plan by an engineer named Ildefons Cerdá. His was the Barcelona we see today: a rigid, rectangular grid––not flashy, but highly practical. Cerdá’s city plan solved the old Barcelona’s top problem: hygiene. By instituting wider streets and limiting housing buildings to 20 meters in height, Cerdá optimized the open space so that each home would get adequate sunlight, and no one would be block. Cerdá’s city blocks were octagonal, making street corners flare into the next and increasing open space even more––a design that he created in anticipation of future, larger forms of transport that he thought would one day be standard. So now as Ryan and I are walking down Las Ramblas, it might not look like Times Square or London, but that’s exactly on purpose, and now the Catalán people want to keep it that way. 

For the six years prior to coming to Spain, I myself lived in a coastal tourist town known for its luxury boutiques, wineries, restaurants, promenades, private beaches, and the royalty that lives there (Harry and Megan, Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah, and more). While I wasn’t “native” to Santa Barbara, after six years I allowed myself the title of local, and wore it with pride. It still is my favorite city on the planet and I believe my bias is strong enough for it to stay that way despite the cities I will visit in the near future. There’s a healthy amount of anti-tourist sentiment in that town, mostly centering on the city’s over-attention to the State Street promenade at the cost of the local non-tourist’s neighborhood’s infrastructure. I had lived in both parts––two years in the outer ring where sidewalks were optional and housing was scarce/overcrowded and one year in the heart of State Street. Both had their charm and I can’t give preference for one or the other. I ate at the touristy restaurants, I also ate at the holes-in-the-wall. I went to the public beaches, and I went to the private beaches. I enjoyed how the city obsessed over beautifying at least one central part of the city rather than none, and that was because the tourists were going to see it. I never faulted or blamed the rest of the world for wanting to see what is truly a spectacular region, and as I walked up the hill to Bunkers del Carmel in Barcelona, graffiti at every turn telling me that their ‘neighborhood is not your tourist site,’ or their ‘commuter bus is not your tram; people take this stop to work,’ I regret to say I couldn’t empathize. 

The view at the top of Bunkers del Carmel was beautiful; the Mediterranean sparkled in the distance, and the sun was setting just beyond Mont Juic. The neighborhood in the foothills of Bunkers del Carmel obviously knew this, maybe had known it for decades or centuries. And now there were about one to two hundred foreigners crowding a small park for the vista, graffiti splattered across every bench. The overlook reminded me of a peak called Gibraltar in Santa Barbara, where I and a few friends could go to watch the sunset, and where the next nearest people would be miles away. It’s a pristine natural space with nothing but a defunct water tower, a view of the pacific, and the type of silence and clean air that heals you. The Mediterranean from Bunkers del Carmel looked reminiscent of the Pacific from Gibraltar in Santa Barbara, and for the first time I saw my own city in California, my private, secret spaces that tourists hadn’t discovered yet. And I saw the top of that mountain full of beer cans, noise pollution, camera phones, and a conga line of buses letting hordes of people on and off the hill. Gibraltar would be ruined. Bunkers del Carmel, under a certain light, then was ruined. I hope they never build benches on Gibraltar. I hope no one makes a tiktok about it.

On the bus down from the vista, I started a conversation with a group I overheard speaking English, and they asked Ryan and I how we knew each other. We’re cousins, I said. They were shocked, pleased, intrigued. I’d not yet grown accustomed to the reaction that that statement receives, and we’d received it a few times over the four days. The expectation is that cousins aren’t that close. Cousins don’t travel together. Cousins see each other once a year at Thanksgiving and then, like an SNL sketch from last week sang, they go back to cousin planet, who knows where. I liked the reaction. It reminded me that I am proud to be part of a family that is as close as we are. 

I can’t say I wasn’t nervous about the trip, though. As far as cousins go, we are close, but I’d never spent more than a full day with just one of you, and there is almost always other family around to buffer. Now here we were planning four days in a foreign city, just Ryan and me. What would we talk about? What if we ran out of things to talk about? What if, after stripping away all the distractions and being forced to communicate with one another, we found that we actually had nothing in common? I know both Ryan and you to be extremely intelligent, very emotionally mature and sensitive, and dignified. Dignified is the right word. I was going to say moral, but that’s a loaded term. You both have strong convictions and very little can dissuade you away from your values. And you’re both such kind people. Dignified carries more sentiment about what I feel towards you rather than what you both are: deep respect, placed on a pedestal, with immense pride to be related to you.

But I’m glad we did it, and we missed you. La Sagrada Familia was unimaginable, indescribable, so I won’t try; the FCB game was unforgettable, and so were our walks around the city, our conversations which didn’t run out, and which enriched our cousinhood, our half-brotherhood.

Love,

Luke

PS I highly encourage you to check out the mathematics of La Sagrada Familia, the world’s tallest church, and its chief architect, Antoni Gaudí. The genius of this man’s structure was truly astounding to witness and I continue to think about it months after seeing it. Gaudí invented architectural techniques that were unprecedented and in fact impossible in his time––he anticipated technologies that didn’t yet exist but would theoretically be able to implement his ideas, and, nearly two hundred years after his death, his intuitions turned out to be correct and many were made manifest in this unbelievable basilica.

Gaudí is known for many other fascinating feats of architecture in Barcelona, and La Sagrada Familia is his magnum opus. Stepping into the church felt like entering a different planet were columns twisted and turned and gravity was lighter, and light was gravitational. It’s insane to me that this man isn’t more well known (I having only heard of this structure when I arrived in Barcelona), not just for his architecture, but for his creativity, ingenuity and dedication to his craft which emphasizes and utilizes the beauty of natural structures. Think fibonacci spiral and other naturally-occurring patterns on steroids––that’s the level of mathematical purity and delicacy this man put into his church.

I have many photos of La Sagrada Familia, including its magnificent interior, but I choose not to share them here because the photos don’t do it justice. See it for yourself someday.