The Unfinished City

Something unusual happens when you spend five days in Barcelona: the city starts to feel like a living argument about what architecture can be. Every generation has added to it — the Romans, the medieval Catalans, Ildefons Cerdà's radical 19th-century grid, then Gaudí and the Modernistas — and none of these layers erased the others. They simply accumulated, creating a place that is simultaneously ancient and perpetually under construction.

The Sagrada Família encapsulates this best. For over a century it has been the world's most famous unfinished building — and now, in the mid-2020s, it is nearly complete. There is something quietly remarkable about a city that waited that long for its cathedral. Barcelona kept building it anyway, across generations, across dictatorship, across the death of the original architect. The decision to keep going is its own kind of statement about the city's relationship to time and ambition.

There is also something worth noticing at the Bunkers del Carmel: the anti-aircraft batteries that were supposed to protect the city during the Civil War are now its finest viewpoint. Barcelonans didn't demolish them. They turned them into a picnic spot, a place for watching sunsets over the city that was bombed. The ruins became a park. It is a very Barcelona way of dealing with history.