Word: spain
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...from these humble origins that the city first arose. While the rest of Spain speaks Castilian, Barcelona and Catalunya claim Catalan as their own; its existence as a language apart bolsters the region's own sense of political and cultural identity. The cultivation of the land by the region's first farmers also aided this nation-building process. Even today, as Hughes readily informs us Barcelona is "more a city of capital and labor than of nobility and commerce," and "its democratic roots are old and run very deep...
...fraught periods. Their successes are notable: the Usatges, for instance, dates from a century before the Magna Carta and is essentially a medieval charter of citizen's rights. In addition, the Consell de Cent (Council of One Hundred), in its day, was the oldest proto-democratic political body in Spain...
...Eixample, or Enlargement, and is the ancestor of all the Utopian schemes of 20th century architecture. The cultural contents of this grid, as it developed, proved no less remarkable. The trade-obsessed city of powerful clerics and stuffy businessmen was the closest place to northern Europe in Spain. It received the ideas of the French Enlightenment, and later those of socialists and anarchists; its music, literature and painting were permeated by French Symbolism, by Wagner and Nietzsche, by Impressionism...
...place where Picasso studied, where Salvador Dali grew up, and out of whose deeply conservative traditions of family and rural life Joan Miro, Catalunya's greatest painter since the 14th century, was able to fashion an art of the most radical poetry. And the best buildings constructed anywhere in Spain between 1860 and the outbreak of World War I were all in Catalunya, and mostly in Barcelona. The combined talents of its turn-of-the-century architects made it La Ciudad de los Prodigios, or the City of Marvels, as the Catalan writer Eduardo Mendoza titled his savagely ironic, picaresque...
...playing ambush. Instead its clever effort, unveiled last week, is billed as "corrective advertising," aimed at misperceptions fostered by Visa advertising that the American Express card is not accepted in Barcelona. "The Olympics don't take American Express," warns Visa. Counters the American Express ad: "And remember, to visit Spain, you don't need a visa." Pepsi is taking a sentimental approach. Its commercial features Magic Johnson, a mainstay of the U.S. basketball team...