A Spanish feast

It is Barcelona's preoccupation with art, fashion and performances that lends perpetual novelty to the city

In the languorous heat of the afternoon sun, I shelter in a cave with walls that look like the scaly bellies of prehistoric beasts. Ahead, a pillar rises up to embrace the ceiling with its tentacles, and, beyond, I espy the giant lizard with jewelled eyes. Tourists are so busy taking selfies with it that I muse that they'll probably admire its sinuous lines and weird scales when they see it in their photographs back home. A busker plays his guitar, filling the caverns of Park Guell, home of Barcelona's favourite son, architect Antoni Gaudi, with strains of a Spanish melody. I wait for my turn to take a selfie with Gaudi's famous lizard, but the lines of people posing with it finally defeat me. Instead, we walk through the Park's serene gardens, admiring the occasional views of Barcelona's striking skyline.

Every now and again, during the next few days in Barcelona, we come across evidences of Gaudi's architectural imagination, which melded so seamlessly with his spirituality and love of nature. The lizard is only one of the many examples of Trencadís, the mosaic technique he introduced, which uses waste ceramic pieces. While exploring La Sagrada Familia, Gaudi's most famous creation, I'm especially struck by a spiral staircase - which he conceptualised as the inside of a seashell - and, of course, the temple, which looks like a forest of giant trees with branching columns. Although the effect is of a slightly trippy Disneyland, the landscape is strangely suited for prayer and introspection. Every nook and cranny is covered in Christian symbolism and, as we walk outside, I see the ever-present cranes that bear testimony to the fact that the Sagrada Familia has been under construction since 1881. Today, ticket sales and public donations support its construction and nobody really knows how much longer it'll be before the cathedral is completed.

Come Saturday and partygoers in Barcelona go from tavern to tavern, order a drink and some tapas

In many ways, the continuously growing Sagrada Familia epitomises the spirit of Barcelona, which, with its preoccupation with art, fashion and performance, seems to have mastered the art of perpetual novelty. We while away long hours in cafes on Las Ramblas, the avenue known as much for tapas as it is for a taste of Barcelona's outdoor culture, watching an impromptu salsa performance as local boys aimlessly kick a football around on the pavement. The slowing of time - such a change from our frenetic lives in Delhi - is a lovely thing to savour, even though I'm aware that some of it could be because the country is facing a huge unemployment crisis in spite of its economy having turned around since the 2008 recession. But still, it has been a bit of a downhill road for the country whose national bird at one time was, as locals joked, the construction crane.

An artist at a pavement

One doesn't feel it, though, especially if one is in Barcelona on a weekend. Come Saturday and partygoers go from tavern to tavern, order a drink, some tapas maybe, and move on. The small plates are great, we realise, as they allow one to sample a variety of foods - trios of anchovies and shrimp, prosciutto with melon and other bite-sized delights. The husband sticks to beer, saying that sangria is how Spaniards use up bad wine, but to me, the orange bits swimming in the ruby red liquid are just so redolent of Spain. Some highly suspect mathematical calculations reveal to me that pitchers of sangria are cheaper than glassfuls of the stuff. The tapas fade to a blur after that, and we roll back to our room at dawn after a night well spent.

The next day, we head to La Barceloneta, the beach district of Barcelona, for paella, the signature Spanish rice dish with seafood and chorizo. We park ourselves in an outdoor cafe and, soon, a skillet of paella is placed on the table, wafts of briny sea rising up from tidbits of fish, squid and shrimp nestling within. A squeeze of lemon here, a spoonful there, and I'm in heaven. We walk along the crowded, touristy beach later, and I muse that tourism must be doing more than its fair share to keep the national exchequer in the green.

In the evening sun, a group of students sing and strum their guitar. I look at their fresh faces, recalling a recent newspaper article that reported that many of them wait as long as three years after passing out to find a job. Then the sun disappears into the water, and the students begin to play with the moody notes of Himno de Asturias, which the Doors adapted in their single, Spanish Caravan. It's getting dark, but I hesitate to leave, content to watch the students. Then it strikes me: Spain may have unemployment, acres of unsold real estate and worse, but it has soul and nothing can take that away from it.