Word: tarragona
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...when in Barcelona, of assuming you're in Spain: The locals in the enchanting Mediterranean coastal city, and the triangle-shaped territory around it, cite Catalan as their national identity. In conversations across the spectrum - young and old, leftist and right-wing, gay and straight, a retired couple near Tarragona and a Moroccan immigrant in Vic - the upcoming Spanish elections are discussed as if they're taking place in a foreign country. "For Catalonia, it is better if?" was how the typical response began. Here, road signs and restaurant menus are written in Catalan. It's also the language...
...show's title is borrowed from a 1925 painting; the world being born was Miró's own, a unique galaxy of pictorial enchantment residing on the border between surrealism and abstraction. The show traces the young Miró's zigzagging path between his family farm in Montroig, near Tarragona, and the heady Paris art scene of the 1920s. Similarly, he zigzagged from earthy ochers, greens and browns to brilliant fantasy hues; from oil painting to collage and construction; and from works crowded with biomorphic creatures to watery cosmic spaces marked only by a floating line, a dot, a sphere...
...begin with, an important town; the Roman capital of what is now Catalunya was farther south, at Tarragona. But Barcelona began to gain significance after the Roman Empire collapsed and the invading Visigoths took over, and it became a capital in the 9th century A.D., when Charlemagne's heirs conquered the city port, threw out the Arabs who had taken charge of it as the northern extension of the Arab conquest of Spain, and then in effect turned it over to a Catalan strongman, Wilfred the Hairy, the semilegendary founder of the Catalan state...
...exactly 2:36 p.m., a 38-ton tanker truck carrying 1,518 cu. ft. of highly combustible propylene gas from nearby Tarragona to an industrial refinery in central Spain peeled around the long bend of the highway behind the camp at 40 m.p.h. and skidded out of control. Perhaps already on fire, it crashed into a retaining wall, rolled and, as it exploded, spewed torrential fountains of fire that washed across most of Los Alfaques. Flames towering hundreds of feet engulfed vacationers and their gear, setting off a secondary round of blasts from exploding butane cookers and automobile gas tanks...
Ambulances and private cars ferried maimed and disfigured victims for emergency treatment to Tarragona, Valencia and 120 miles northeast to Barcelona. West German and Swiss rescue planes were pressed into service to transport others to specialized burn centers in their home countries. But doctors predicted that most of the injured, burned over 90% of their bodies, could not survive...