Word: mediterraneans
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Barcelona is and always has been a place of industry. In fact, for most of the 19th century it was the only industrial city in Spain, a sort of Mediterranean Manchester raised to wealth on cotton, silk and metal, presided over by a triumphant bourgeoisie and racked by working-class (especially anarchist) rebellion. Catalans are archetypally producers rather than dreamers, and they tend to pride themselves on what they call seny, common sense raised almost to the level of a theological virtue. They like you to know they have molta feina, a work overload. They do not see themselves...
From then on, Catalans ran Catalunya, and Barcelona, for themselves. They were jealous of their independence and determined to sustain their own laws ; and language. From the 13th century through the 15th, their outward thrust created a Mediterranean trading empire that stretched from the coast of North Africa to the gates of Byzantium. With the money this brought home, a city grew: the greatest Spanish city of the Middle Ages. Even today the Barri Gotic, or Old City, of Barcelona, facing the port, contains in its winding alleys more functioning Gothic structures than any other such enclave in Europe...
...first spurt of renewal was in the Middle Ages, creating the Gothic city. Then came a slump, as the ascendancy of Castile and the shift of trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic thrust Barcelona into a 200-year depression, from which it began to recover by industrializing only at the end of the 18th century...
...century A.D., Iberia had almost become one. Its central administrative order, that of the Roman Empire, had long since dissolved. Over it, Visigothic laws and Christian rites had been superimposed. But as a political entity, Iberia was on the verge of collapse. Thus when the Arabs looked across the Mediterranean, they saw a vast territory spotted with squabbling factions -- Christians, Jews, Visigoths -- separated 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...
...words "We are all going to die," an assassin in uniform raised his submachine gun and fired, killing the 73-year-old Algerian head of state. Boudiaf may have thought he was merely making a philosophical point in his address to a crowd at a cultural center in the Mediterranean port city of Annaba. It was his first trip outside Algiers since he took office after a military coup in January. In the confusion and panic that followed, 41 other people were wounded by gunfire and grenades...