Places speak and transmit everything they have seen. It is not unusual to meet, throughout the year, big names from the literary world in the rooms of the Alma hotel. In recent months, for example, Eduardo Mendoza has been spotted in the cocktail bar, and Nobel Prize winners such as Olga Tokarczuk and J.M. Coetzee – invited to the city by the CCCB – calmly cooled off on the ground floor terrace, as in their day it was done by the Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich. Last night's party at La Vanguardia was just an extreme concentration of something that, from time to time, occurs naturally. If no city in the world has the concentration of authors per square meter that Barcelona has for Sant Jordi, the annual event of this newspaper multiplies the density to unimaginable extremes (wherever you look, there is an author, or several, it is impossible not to come across they).
Places talk and this hotel is electric. In the building, from the end of the 19th century, lived the American engineer Frederick Stark Pearson, the man who brought electricity to Barcelona ("pearls like this are no longer found in the world," he exclaimed upon arriving. "We will soon make Barcelona a city bigger than Buenos Aires"). Pearson created the Barcelona Traction Light and Power Company – better known as La Canadiane – and died tragically in the shipwreck of the Lusitania in 1915, sunk by a German submarine.
In front of the party, as soon as they left, some entered the Camps Elisis passage, named in homage to the amusement park that from 1853 to 1875 occupied that entire area of Passeig de Gràcia – eight hectares, eight blocks from the Eixample. with roller coasters, gardens with labyrinths, lakes, circus with wild animals, a horse track, carousel, theater...
How could this party not be fun?
