Word: catalonia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That was a little how it felt as Barcelona, the often unshaven but designer- crazy capital of Catalonia, set flame to the Games of the 25th Olympiad. The occasion was a golden opportunity for presenting the city as a shiny new capital of a postnational world. It was also a quadrilingual glimpse into a multicultural future. Music at the celebrations that opened the Games came from an atlas of names -- Ryuichi Sakamoto, Angelo Badalamenti (of Twin Peaks fame), Andrew Lloyd Webber; Placido Domingo was followed by a sea of "living sculptures" designed by a man from the West Indies...
...most prominent country in the early going, however, had been one that did not march but made its presence felt at every turn: independent-minded Catalonia, which is determined to cast these as the Catalan, not the Spanish, Games. A longtime enemy of Castile, delighting in a language that Franco had banned, Barcelona was eager not just to show off its faster, higher, stronger ^ self -- reconstruction is almost as trendy as deconstruction here -- but to emphasize its distance from the Spain of myth, and of Madrid. FREEDOM FOR CATALONIA signs (in English) were draped from balconies and shoulders, and buttons...
...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...