Winter storms

One of the good things people often mention about Barcelona is its nice weather, especially its soft winters. This is basically true, but sometimes we are visited by a phenomenon that makes the beaches empty of bathers and surfers. I am talking about storms coming from the East.
The northern wind known as Tramuntana is renowned for its vigour and intensity, but the east wind, which is more constant, sometimes gets mad and destroys beaches and boardwalks of our coast with heavy its rains, low temperatures and strong waves. Sometimes this combination even makes snow pop up near the coast of Barcelona.
There are storms like this throughout the year, but the most common time is for them are spring and fall. One of the most famous is the one that happened during Boxing Day 2008, but in 1911 there was one that affected the entire Catalan coast and Barcelona and caused 28 deaths only in Barcelona. As the singer Raimon says, rain doesn't know how to rain in our country...
To protect the beaches and prevent regression caused by eastern storms during winter, the municipality built between 2006 and 2010 three dams that stabilize the shoreline.
The storms, however, continue visiting us.

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 :)

Sunday afternoon at La Ciutadella

Some people compare the Parc de la Ciutadella to Central Park in New York.
I guess they are not thinking about its surface (Central Park is 20 times larger than the Ciutadella) or its origin, but rather about its role in the city.

After the War of the Spanish Succession of 1714, Philip V had a citadel built on the area that the park occupies now to dominate the city of Barcelona, ​​and incidentally, all of Catalonia. The building, which also forced the destruction of the Ribera district, became a symbol that was hated by the locals, until its demolition was decided in the nineteenth century, leaving only some of the interior buildings. One of them was the arsenal, which now houses the Parliament of Catalonia.

Anyway, what I meant is that the Ciutadella Park is now a meeting place for many locals, that go there for a walk, a picnic or just to spend Sunday afternoons.
And...is there anything better than having a nap on the lawn, with the spring sun heating your body?

Pruned planetrees

I'm sure we all agree that the tree that we most associate with the streets of Barcelona is the planetree (also known as London planetree :) ).

In fact, more than a third of the approximately 150,000 trees that grow on the streets of the city are platrees. The reason is that they are quite bright and colorful, grow fast, adapt easily to various conditions and provide shade during the hot summer months.

It should also be noted, however, that not everybody loves planetrees. Many people suffer from pollen allergies during spring, and autumn leaves always fill the sidewalks. Some people even say that those leaves are slippery and dangerous. Also, many of these trees are sick and have pests. Who knows, maybe.

Therefore, and in order to counteract the historic dominance of planetrees in Barcelona, the city tries to replace them with other species that are considered best for the city, such as Mediterranean hackberries and cherry plums, especially on those streets with narrow sidewalks.

Planetrees rapid growth and the freedom they need to grow up happy can not be found in many streets, so they have to be pruned, and in a quite severe way. That brings us to a landscape that is also typical of Barcelona, as shown in the image: a street full of banana trunks. It doesn't matter how pruned they are, the trees always find the way t recover. I do not know you, but I like the planetrees.

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.

Argentine parrots

I'm sure they do not appear in travel guides, and I am positive that tourists haven't noticed them, but they are also part of the landscape of Barcelona: Argentine parrots are those little birds of the family of parakeets and cockatoos, that emit a peculiar noise.

They arrived in Barcelona more than 30 years ago, from South America and it looks that they have adapted well. It seems that at some time they were fashionable as pets, due to their green plumage with gray belly, and they were much cheaper than the typical parrots. But they turned out to be were unfriendly, they pecked their owners, they shrieked and....were keen on escaping! In other words, they wanted to live in freedom. So some of them escaped from their cages and now we have about 3,000 scattered in Barcelona, ​​living with us.

Some look at them as a plague, but considering that there are about 250,000 pigeons in the city, I think they don'l give any hassle.

And besides, it is funny to think that the birds that have arrived from Argentina to Barcelona  are parrots, which is an animal that has traditionally been used to describe someone who talks too much.

An irony, as well as Argentines (Argentine humans, that is) have a reputation for talking a lot. Of course it's a cliché ....isn't it?

La Carretera de les Aigües

.... or rather, the view from La Carretera de les Aigües (literally, the road of the Water)!

In Barcelona we have a green treasure. Actually it's not only ours, but we share it with other municipalities around, and its name is Collserola. And yes, those who say that the park suffers many attacks are quite right, but it is still a privilege to have a space like this, which can be reached by public transportation. As they say, it is one of the largest metropolitan parks in the world.

The Carretera de les Aigües is the secret that the people from Barcelona keep in this green park. A walk along its route helps restore your spirit. At least it happens to me. And when I sit in one of the benches along its route, I admire the esplanade of Barcelona and I think .... Wow! No matter if the day is sunny and the visibility is good or the atmosphere is dirty, foggy, and cloudy...it always happens to me... Wow!