A community for craftsters

Because of winter break and then we had a guest.

Today we went to Trinitat Vella and Singuerlin, north into the mountains a bit from the center of Barcelona. This is an area that was either farms or nothing until relatively recently- we saw a lot of 1960s-era brick apartment blocks, and a small number of older houses. Since there isn't as much obvious physical History in this area, the talking parts of the walk were more a collection of random things, but the view at the end was absolutely stunning and fully justified the entire trip.

At one point our fearless leader was telling us about a little group of three 1800s houses when the owner of one of these homes drove by and was like "That one's mine" (but in Catalan of course) so we all told him how lovely his house is.

We talked about how these areas are now well-connected to the city center by metro and bus lines, bike lanes, and even street-infrastructure escalators and elevators so that walking from the metro station up the mountainside isn't as totally murderous as it would otherwise be.

We talked a bit about industrialization and waves of immigration, first from other parts of Spain and then from the rest of the world, which caused this area to be developed into residential areas because of housing shortages in the city. We also saw a few "barracas" (which means something more like "shacks") where during these housing shortages people just built on unoccupied land with whatever materials they could find.

We also talked about the factories that are currently located out here- Cacaolat chocolate milk and Damm beer, and about how the founder of Damm came to Barcelona from Alsace/Alsatia during the Franco-Prussian War. So it's in a sense both a German beer and a local company.

We also saw a tiny little solar farm and talked about how Spain overall gets about 50% of its electricity from renewable sources, but Barcelona's percentage is very low because there aren't many good locations for renewable energy generation close to the city - there's a river but it's small and slow-moving, there's very little even flat-ish land that isn't in use, and there's tension between putting up windmills vs keeping the mountains pictursque and natural for tourism. When Sparkly & guest & I went to Madrid this past weekend, I saw several solar farms and some windmills from the train, out in the middle of nowhere. I"ve seen a few buildings with rooftop solar in Barcelona, but probably we need more of those.

I felt great while I was out but crashed a little after coming home. The weather was beautiful during the walk though, and I take slightly silly pride in being the lightest-dressed person in the group (t-shirt and flannel button-down, to everybody else's hoodies and winter coats).