The Most Dynamic City in Europe?

By MARGOT HORNBLOWER BARCELONA

A Joan Miro sculpture towers over Barcelona's Parc de l'Escorxador, its riotous colors glinting in the sun. Around it, grandmothers in sneakers, stocky shopkeepers and children in starched frocks join hands. A brass band brays for a slow-motion minuet. Toes out! Toes in! Deliberately, then merrily, 500 people count steps. The sardanas are courtly affairs, far removed from the stomping passion of Spanish flamenco. Under the Franco dictatorship, the dances were banned as subversive evidence of Catalan nationalism. But now, on Sunday afternoons, they are as ubiquitous as barbershop quartets at Iowa county fairs. "They're a sign of our identity," says Joan Anglada, a furniture salesman, pausing for breath.

A tourist set loose in born-again Barcelona bumps into such euphoric boosterism around every corner. "Catalonia is a nation!" exults Jordi Pujol, president of the autonomous region of 6 million people. "We have our own language, our own history, our own culture." To show it off, the city of 1.7 million has seized upon the 1992 Summer Olympics, with its windfall of government money and free publicity, and has catapulted itself into the ranks of Europe's favored capitals. "You go to Milan, Paris or Hamburg, and people marvel that Barcelona has become the most dynamic city in Europe," says Jose Maria Marti Ruffo, a London-based Catalan businessman.

Along the waterfront, where Christopher Columbus' statue points triumphantly out to sea, rusty railroad tracks were torn up to make way for two miles of sandy swimming beaches and palm-shaded cafes. About $2 billion worth of stadiums, hotels, restaurants and museums have been built or are under construction, a showcase for internationally known architects such as Richard Meier, Arata Isozaki and Jose Rafael Moneo. "It's an orgy of creativity," says Mayor Pasqual Maragall, grandson of Catalonia's most famous poet. A former lecturer in urban planning at Johns Hopkins University, Maragall invited such American artists as Claes Oldenburg and Ellsworth Kelly to make sculptures for a new park system that has become an international model of city planning.

Aesthetes may complain that Barcelona lacks the glittering royal art galleries and grandiose vistas of London, Madrid or Paris and that its geography, a natural amphitheater framed by mountains and sea, produces a smog worthy of Los Angeles. Some may even view as excessive chauvinism the natives' insistence on speaking Catalan rather than Spanish. But those who take the time will discover in this most Mediterranean of cities a rare personality, fanatically avant-garde yet obsessively preservationist. First century Roman baths are being excavated amid the twisting streets of its dense Gothic quarter. The famous Picasso Museum is housed in a 15th century palace; the main Olympic stadium is a renovated 1929 arena. This month Antoni Tapies, Catalonia's best-known living painter, will open, in a refurbished art deco mansion, a foundation featuring four decades of abstract works. "Catalonia," says Tapies, "can be summed up in an old motto, seny i rauxa -- prudence and daring."

The daring part crops up in the kitschy surrealism of Salvador Dali; in the sensuous modernismo architecture of Catalonia's turn-of-the-centur y masters, * Antonio Gaudi and Lluis Domenech i Montaner; and in the explosion of contemporary design that has transformed the city's nightclubs and even furniture stores into tourist attractions. If Madrid was ever a city of soldiers and aristocrats, Barcelona is a metropolis of merchants and artisans. Its fame springs from monuments like Gaudi's Templo de la Sagrada Familia (Sacred Family Cathedral), with its stone-dripped spires and wildly ornamented facades. But it is less a city where one tramps from one guidebook attraction to another than a place that unfolds like a treasure hunt, revealing itself in small clues: rococo streetlights and curlicued ironwork balconies; a stained-glass peacock, an art nouveau marvel, nestled above the door of Escriba, a celestial chocolate shop; a Gaudi-designed sidewalk of blue-green pavement stones carved with sea creatures.

The discovered delights are more than visual. In the Boqueria, an open-air marketplace, five varieties of wild mushrooms are fried up for less than $5 at a simple lunch counter. The funicular to Tibidabo, Catalonia's answer to Coney Island, presents a panoramic view of the turquoise sea. Take in a concert at the flamboyant 1908 Palace of Music, with its lush mosaics and Wagnerian Valkyries. Pick up a souvenir at a street table staffed by separatist activists: a sticker of Snoopy hoisting the Catalan flag. (Wear it to the annual El Barca-Real Madrid soccer match -- and be prepared for a fistfight.)

In the summer, a visit to Barcelona can be steamy and is best punctuated with side trips to the ancient villages of the Pyrenees, with their Romanesque churches. In the fall, the city is at its cultural high season, with the Festival del Tardor, an international theater, dance and music extravaganza. Spain's best opera house, the gilded Liceo in Barcelona, features fine international singers, including homegrown stars Jose Carreras and Montserrat Caballe. No matter what the season, the traveler can feast at one of the fish restaurants of working-class Barcelona, its neon signs flashing and its laundry rippling from the balconies. Sadly, a new coastal-protection law threatens to shut down the parasoled beach tables, where you can enjoy paella while a barefoot, sad-eyed Gypsy girl plays a miniature accordion.

Barcelonans inevitably end their evenings with a stroll up the Ramblas, the ebullient boulevard where all classes, ages and ideologies flow in a restless human torrent. This populist Champs Elysees, a Felliniesque vision, is lined / with stalls selling flowers, parrots, canaries and turtles; newspaper kiosks with journals in eight languages; cafes dishing up snacks of fried squid and hard sausage; Gypsy fortune tellers, their tarot cards laid out on fold-up tables. On one street corner, Eduardo Mazo, an Argentine poet, has pasted his verse on billboards for more than a decade. "The Ramblas is the most magic mile in Europe," he says. "People begin at one end when they're tired of life. By the time they get to the other end, they're in love with life." And with Barcelona.