Circus tents

Have you ever been to the circus in Barcelona? I have, but just to one of those big and "modern" circuses focused more to attract adult audiences. The truth is that I would have liked to go to a circus as a child, one of those traditional ones, those who assemble and remove their tents in the few open spaces left in the city.

Those circus in which artists arrive in trucks and vans, the ones that exercise a fascination among those of us who do not live on the road, the ones that make us wonder what it is like to live in a special community, a nomadic family.

The truth is that circuses have changed a lot since I was little. Luckily, they still visit us. For the record, I like that they are adapting to changing times. And by the way, there is a circus school working in the Parc del Forum. It is called La Central del Circ, and is meant to be a space for developing circus activities that the City Council prompted, and where training courses are held, in case if anyone is thinking about it!

Snowflake (Floquet de Neu)

One of the most visited post of the (short) History of this blog is the one about Ulysses the Orca, that I wrote and published about a year ago. The visits to the Catalan and Spanish version of this post has almost three times the ones to the next one, about the chocolate of Petritxol street, in second place.
Ulysses the orca has probably been the second most famous resident of the Barcelona Zoo, in dispute with the elephant may Avi, the first one to come to our zoo. They both are defeated, and I think there's no doubt about it, by our white gorilla, Snowflake.
I remember seeing Snowflake on several occasions when I was a kid, and I must say that I loved him but he was not specially friendly. I always attributed this to the fact that he knew he was special, and that many of us visited the zoo just see him, so he was aware he was quite famous. Perhaps it was just my imagination.
Although he had 22 children before dying in 2003 at the (approximate) age of 39, none of them inherited his albinism. Maybe that's why the zoo of Barcelona continues to receive letters asking to clone him, something that is theoretically possible because there are the samples of his DNA. What do you think? Would you like to have another Snowflake through clonation? Perhaps the new one is a bit more humble :)

The whale Ulisses

Remember the whale Ulisses? Together with the gorilla Floquet de Neu (Snowflake), he was probably the most famous inhabitant of our zoo.

Actually his fame soared when someone told us that he had become too big for the aquarium and the zoo of Barcelona, and he had to be moved to another location to prevent him from suffering. It was the year 1994 and the transfer was thoroughly prepared; it was followed by thousands of people on huge screens and broadcasted live by TV3. Everything was settled to make sure he had a nice trip to Sea World in San Diego, California.

Well, what has happened to our most beloved killer whale after all this time? Now Ulisses is 30 years old and is a little chubby (he has gained around 1300 kilograms since then). He recently became the father of a little whale (150 kilograms at birth) called Moana and born after in vitro fertilization. It turns out that the poor Ulysses has not been able to meet his daughter, who was born in a French aquarium.

Something that seems to be certain is that Ulysses will never come back to Barcelona. The agreement that was signed with Sea World stated that he and half of his offspring would return to Barcelona. Of course that was signed when it was thought that at this stage we would have a marine zoo big enough to accommodate a killer whale, which currently does not seem to be happening in the near future.