Americans for Catalonia

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Gaudí didn't only show Jesus as a baby or as a preacher. On the Sagrada Família, he also shows him as a teenager at a carpenter's workbench, learning the family trade.

The scene is on the Portal of Faith, the right-hand doorway of the Nativity Façade. This doorway covers Jesus's "hidden life," the long stretch between his birth and his preaching that the Gospels barely describe. Nearby, Mary visits her cousin Elizabeth, and a slightly older Jesus teaches in the temple.

Why carpentry? Joseph was a carpenter, and the Gospel of Mark calls Jesus a carpenter too. The original Greek word, tekton, can also mean builder or craftsman. Pretty fitting on a building that has been under construction since 1882.

Gaudí wanted these figures to look alive, not frozen. So he worked from real people. He found the right pose, photographed his model in front of mirrors to capture several angles, then covered them in plaster to make a mold. Before anything was carved in stone, he hung the plaster version on the façade to check how it looked from the street.

His models were not celebrities. According to the Sagrada Família's own archive, they ranged from bishops and soldiers to ragmen, goat herders, tavern hands and laborers. Neighbors and workers from the building site, in other words. He even made molds of animals.

The Nativity Façade is the part Gaudí oversaw himself, and in 2005 UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site.

If you were outside the Sagrada Família this morning, you got much more than a view of Gaudí’s basilica.

You got a crash course in Catalan tradition.

On Saturday, October 3, groups from across Catalonia gathered outside the Sagrada Família for four hours of falcons, gegants and esbarts — three traditions that can look wonderfully unusual if you’ve never seen them before.

The gegants, or “giants,” are enormous figures carried through the streets by people hidden inside them.

Different Barcelona neighborhoods and Catalan towns have their own characters, some with traditions stretching back generations.

Then came the falcons. They create human towers and elaborate acrobatic formations using nothing but people, balance and a remarkable amount of trust.

And the esbarts are traditional Catalan dance groups, preserving dances, costumes and music that might otherwise have disappeared.

Today’s event brought together groups from Barcelona neighborhoods including Gràcia, Clot, Sagrada Família and Sant Martí, as well as groups from Piera, Vilassar de Mar and Girona.

There was something particularly fitting about seeing all of this beneath Gaudí’s towers.

The celebration is part of Gaudí Year, marking 100 years since the architect’s death in 1926.

Barcelona isn’t only Gaudí, beaches and tapas.

Sometimes the best way to understand the city is to stand among the locals and watch traditions that are still very much alive.

The Picasso Museum doesn't fit in one palace. It takes five.

They stand side by side on Carrer de Montcada, in El Born: Palau Aguilar, Palau del Baró de Castellet, Palau Meca, Casa Mauri and Palau Finestres. Built between the 13th and 15th centuries, they are now connected inside, so you move from one medieval mansion to the next without going back out to the street.

Five hundred years ago, this was the most exclusive address in town. Nobles and merchants who got rich from sea trade built their homes here. Today the street is considered the finest collection of medieval civil architecture in Barcelona.

The biggest surprise came in 1961. While restoring Palau Aguilar to open the museum, workers discovered medieval paintings running along the top of a room's walls, in a band about 6.5 feet (2 meters) tall. They tell the story of King James I conquering Mallorca in 1229. They were painted around 1285, nearly 700 years before anyone found them.

The twist? You won't see them in the Picasso Museum. They were carefully peeled off the walls and moved to the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC) on Montjuïc, where they are still on display.

The street's good times didn't last. In the late 1800s, many wealthy families left for the brand-new Eixample district. In 1947, Carrer de Montcada was protected as a national historic and artistic site.

Gaudí built a mushroom forest. Then he parked horses in it.

This is the basement of Palau Güell, the mansion Gaudí designed for his patron Eusebi Güell between 1886 and 1890, just off La Rambla. It was one of his first big jobs, and he was barely in his thirties.

Down here lived the family's horses. Carriages rolled straight in from the street through two giant iron gates. The horses then walked down a spiral ramp into the stables, where each one had its own stall and manger.

Those stubby brick pillars are not decoration. They hold up the entire palace above your head. Gaudí just gave their tops the shape of mushroom caps, an idea borrowed from nature that he kept using for the rest of his career.

It wasn't only horses. The coachman and the stable boy had rooms down here too, next to piles of straw, wood and coal, a well, and a tank that collected rainwater.

Then came a darker chapter. In 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, the palace was seized and turned into a police barracks with a jail. Part of this basement held prisoners.

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1909 is not a random year for a church photo in Barcelona. That summer, rioters set fire to about half of the city's religious buildings.

It started in late July. The government called up reservists to fight a war in Morocco, and many of them were working men with wives and kids. Wealthier families could pay a fee to keep their sons at home. The poor couldn't.

A general strike turned into a week of barricades and fires. Around 80 churches, convents and religious schools burned. Barcelona earned a nickname that stuck: la Rosa de Foc (the Rose of Fire). Historians call it the Setmana Tràgica (Tragic Week).

Meanwhile, the Barcelona Cathedral was still a construction site. Its Gothic-looking front, which most visitors assume is medieval, was only finished in 1890, paid for by a banker named Manuel Girona. For centuries before that, the facade was a plain, unfinished wall. In 1909, his children were paying for the dome and its spire. They were done in 1913.

The cloister, though, is the real medieval deal. Work on it was completed in 1448, 44 years before Columbus sailed.

And one thing hasn't changed since at least the 1500s: the geese. Thirteen white geese live here, one for each year of Saint Eulàlia, the city's patron saint, who according to tradition was martyred at 13. They also worked as a night alarm, honking whenever someone wandered in.