In her emphatic speech on May 2, Isabel Díaz Ayuso attributed to Madrid the last of the capitals she needed to proclaim: that of the Mediterranean. However audacious it may be: it is hard to imagine the mayor of Paris claiming her city as a Mediterranean capital to the detriment of Marseille, Nice or Toulon itself, a pirate port and the scene of warlike events such as the sinking of the French fleet in 1942, provoked to prevent it from falling into Hitler's hands.
This inland sea, the second largest on the planet after the Caribbean, has witnessed the alternation of leadership throughout history. Each civilization has promoted a system of cities to rule the Mediterranean shores. Barcelona's moment began in the 13th century, when, in the words of historian José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec, King James I began to see the Mediterranean world as a natural projection of the Catalan city.
This concept of natural projection has continued to be wielded, with more or less foundation, until today, when Barcelona, encouraged by the irruption of a promising blue economy ecosystem and the catalyst that the Copa de l' America of 2024, again has – or so it seems – a certain Mediterranean ambition.
Ideas such as the competitive advantage of fully exploiting this overseas projection, in the tradition of a city built on commerce, are emerging once again.
But it is not as common – or at least, not as much as it should be – that the city's responsibility for the regeneration of this sea that has given it so much throughout history is emphasized. In this context, a symposium recently held in Barcelona, Troubled Blue, within the framework of the international program A Sea Change, has warned about the urgency of changing the way we relate to the Mediterranean and the rest of the seas. On several fronts.
The researcher Marta Puxan-Oliva developed the idea that illegal fishing is not only lethal for the environment or for the economic activity itself, but also generates a dynamic of modern slavery that is difficult to detect and combat in waters that are everyone's but in reality they are nobody's. He provided examples of human rights violations that, while occurring in remote seas, should not be foreign to us as clients of the global fishing industry.
It is one of the topics addressed in the documentary Frightened, by the filmmaker De Nis, who is also attending this symposium – organized by the Barcelona foundation Quo Artis with the collaboration of Europa Creativa – as is the entrepreneur in the blue economy Ignasi Ferrer or artists such as Robertina Šebjanič, Maja Smrekaro Filippo Minelli.
The symposium reinforces the idea that, on paper, Barcelona has solid arguments to lead or (or co-lead) not only the discourse of economic development in the Mediterranean, but also that of environmental restitution and that of promoting social, political and even artistic initiatives that pursue criminal practices in all seas.
The America's Cup can be a good ally for the city in terms of innovation in sustainable marine practices, a vocation inherent in this competition, but it is up to the institutions and civil society to take more ambitious steps along the lines of what was set out at the beginning: return to the Mediterranean everything that has given to Barcelona.
For example: the city that has managed to become the Mediterranean capital of cruises should be the same one that provides imaginative solutions to make this industry compatible with the new environmental standards and the fight against tourist saturation. There are fewer and fewer people who defend such a predatory practice as cruises that do not stay overnight in the cities where they stop. But little or nothing continues to be done about the issue.
