Word: catalonia
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...from Africa by a small strait and ripe for conquest. In 711 a mixed force of Arabs and Berbers under the command of Musa ibn Nusayr crossed the sea and smashed through the patchy Visigothic resistance; within 50 years most of Spain, except for the pockets of Castile and Catalonia in the north, had become al-Andalus, the farthest western expansion of a vast Muslim empire run by the Abbasid dynasty from Baghdad...
...year 1492 was Spain's annus mirabilis, a year of marvels. A Spanish Pope was elected that year, a Borja from Catalonia. (He was called Borgia in Italy, where the Two Sicilies already had Spanish rulers.) King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who had just united their kingdoms, drove the Moors from the Spanish peninsula by a military victory at Granada. Spain's Jews were expelled in the same year, solidifying the Inquisition's power...
Sensual, spiritual, whimsical, exuberant -- few buildings so symbolize a city as Barcelona's unfinished Sagrada Familia: the Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family. Architect Antoni Gaudi's masterpiece dominates the skyline of Catalonia's capital, attracting 700,000 visitors a year. Its art nouveau stonework, its mosaic-encrusted bell towers and its warped geometry brilliantly mock the banality of much modern architecture...
This comes through very strongly in the work of the Catalan artist Joaquim Sunyer (1874-1956), chief painter in the Noucentista group, a circle of artists and writers who reacted against art nouveau in Barcelona after 1906. Sunyer's Pastoral, 1910-11, was owned by Joan Maragall, Catalonia's finest modernist poet, who wrote about it as a virtual icon of national identity: "Consider the woman in Sunyer's Pastoral -- she is the embodiment of the landscape; she . . . is not there by chance: she is destiny." It was out of that conservatism -- the cult of the parental farmhouse...
...rare personality, fanatically avant-garde yet obsessively preservationist. First century Roman baths are being excavated amid the twisting streets of its dense Gothic quarter. The famous Picasso Museum is housed in a 15th century palace; the main Olympic stadium is a renovated 1929 arena. This month Antoni Tapies, Catalonia's best-known living painter, will open, in a refurbished art deco mansion, a foundation featuring four decades of abstract works. "Catalonia," says Tapies, "can be summed up in an old motto, seny i rauxa -- prudence and daring...