From The Sunday Times Travel Magazine

You could never accuse Barcelona of trading on past glories. So relentlessly self-reinventive is the Catalan capital, it’s singer Madonna in municipal clothing.

A new Vietnamese chef-in-town spices up Med seafood with Asian fire and a dash of hot Louisiana. Another dozen design hotels with revolving restaurants or whatever pop up like mushrooms. And a fresh swathe of industrial wasteland submits to trendy gentrification – not for nothing do town planners with sideburns and square specs refer to the ‘Barcelona Model’ when praising ingenious urban- regeneration projects around the globe.

You have to hand it to Barcelona – where else in Europe can possibly keep pace?It’s as if the 1992-Olympics facelift gave her winged feet, and she hasn’t stopped running since.

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That is, of course, partly what happened. But co-existing with the breathless sprinter is, lest we forget, one of the most laid-back, leisurely, self-effacing seafront cities in the Med – a fact increasingly overlooked as girl-next-door Valencia puckers up prettily for weekenders.

Barcelona is a corking millefeuille of cultures millennia old: of rambling Roman walls and steroidal medieval grandeur. Of promenades below palms, and fish-scoffing sessions for all the family, while beach breezes play with the tablecloths. In quiet squares the days inch by like shadows across sundials, and life among generations plays out without artifice.

With the residents of waterfront Barceloneta making local headlines – ‘relocated’ to permit a fancy remodelling of their traditional fishermen’s quarter – it seems more timely than ever to sit back and appreciate what’s old.

GREAT CITY AGES

Another city hides in the shadowy half-light under La Seu Cathedral. Below the adjacent Museu d’Historia de la Ciutat (Plaça del Rei; 00 34 93 256 2100, www.museuhistoria.bcn.cat; £4.60) lies Barcino: Roman Barcelona. Your gaze adjusts to biscuity walls holding fragments of Latin-inscribed slabs. Domestic oddities are arrayed (a second-century perfume burner depicting the Egyptian god Horus). And there’s a whole fish-processing plant, with vats intact: in the dank ghostliness you can almost smell the garum paste that put Barcino on the culinary map, tickling palates all around the ancient Mediterranean.

Barcelona meant business in the Middle Ages, coining it in from far and wide. By the 1400s, merchant pads in El Born rivalled Renaissance Florence (see them on Carrer Montcada). If you only do one medieval sight, make it the Esglesia (Church) de Santa Maria del Mar (Plaça de Santa Maria): it’s like a great ark, high above the rooftops. Inside you find a vast ribcage of brick pillars lit by votive candles – take a pew for a hypnotic half-hour.

The acid-trip architecture of Antoni Gaudí hogs the limelight, but the city’s early 20th-century golden age delivered many unsung stunners: the Palau de la Música Catalana (Calle Palau de la Música 2-4; 00 34 93 295 7200, www.palaumusica.org; tours £7.70) is a mad concert hall by Catalan wonder-kid Lluís Domènech i Montaner. It evokes a garden in a glass house, with ceramic roses wriggling, a buttercup glow of stained glass, and stone muses bursting from walls. A century old this year, it looks radiant, a torch from a wild, wilful and ultimately doomed era.

Presaging Franco’s repression of Catalan identity, the 1929 International Exhibition saw tacky Hispanic buildings showcased (enforced) upon Montjuic Hill. Marvels, too: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s German entry was the fine Pavilion (Marquès de Comilles, s/n; 00 34 93 423 4016, www.miesbcn.com; £3). The one here now is a 1986 replica, but it’s still a tranquil delight: a Modernist forerunner in glass, steel and marble, with aqua-basins of pebbles, like a ’60s California beach house on a clear day. See also Mies van der Rohe’s buttonback Barcelona Chair, unveiled with the original Pavilion, and now a star of banks and bachelor pads worldwide.