When you open your eyes, such light reigns in the streets that you immediately realize: it is Christmas. The church bells are heard. You rub the foggy glass with your sleeve and through that clear beam in the window appears another city: a bright setting full of candor, oblivious to energy crises and pandemic horrors. Many will raise their eyebrows at this excessive invitation to imaginary festive fable and good feelings. You open the little door of the day on your Advent calendar, grab your coat and, with the taste of chocolate still in your mouth, you surrender to the illuminated streets.
Light trails
If there is a Christmas tradition that is joyful, relaxed and off the agenda, it is to score the Christmas lights that decorate our avenues. This year’s ornamental jungle finds its great emergence in the new led lighting designed by the studio of Antonio Arola for the city center. Its golden rays cover the plaza de Catalunya under a large pergola that flickers with a warm heartbeat, the Gran Via the roof of a great house from which hang infinite tubular lamps, and they cross the street of Aragon with a kind of iridescent sticks that look for vanishing points and starry perspectives.
But in our particular contest, we also let ourselves be carried away by the luminous zigzags that entangle the streets of the Gothic, or the simple lianas of bulbs that knot the trees of Rambla Catalunya. There are also majestic butterflies that glide among stars all over Paseo de Gracia to Jardinets, fascinating children’s gazes. You chase each flash along sidewalks and zebra crossings, and soon realize that, nevertheless, what makes you especially fond of are those ugly, colorful asteroids that are scattered like an arcade constellation through the streets of Thanks and the Eixample. That, and the joy caused by the balconies and shop windows lit by neighbors and merchants from each neighborhood. Those garlands of particular little lights are the ones that truly light a fire within you.
Temples of christmas
The luminescent patterns take you without hardly thinking about it to that new and splendid Christmas garden that has invaded this Christmas the Modernist enclosure of Sant Pau (Sant Antoni Maria Claret, 167). At sunset, ‘The Lights of St. Paul‘ they sparkle a splendid audiovisual forest, a sensory experience made of staged flora and sound tunnels, in keeping with the traditional English and German ‘Christmas Gardens’.
The rumor of Christmas carols lifts you up to the Poble Espanyol (Av. Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, 13), turned into a gigantic Advent calendar by the work and grace of ‘Christmas in the Village. That fabulous Christmas landscape made of 24 thematic corners with typical characters and scenes is finished off with Santa Claus house, open until December 24, and that of the wise men, who will receive letters from December 26.
In our city, Christmas does not turn its back on the sea either. That’s why you approach the Moll de la Fusta to breathe the atmosphere of Nadal al Port. The fascination under that great noria of hexagonal cabins, 65 meters of fanfare and vertigo for the brave. You are satisfied with seeing how Port Vell shines with that manger luminous and floating, the gleaming and enormous led tree, the ‘vintage’ carousel, the children’s area and the naive fairground stalls of a lifetime.
Markets and mangers
Now you just have to follow the route through the usual myriad of markets and mangers. This year we are confused with that birth distributed between Plaça de Sant Jaume and the facades of Carrer Ferran. That’s why you prefer to entertain yourself by visiting cribs as original as those that can be seen in the Museum of Ethnology and World Cultures (Paseo de Santa Madrona, 16), which they have assembled with recyclable materials in the parish of Sant Ramon Nonat (av. de Sant Ramon Nonat, 1), el de Playmobil what looks in the La Violeta Popular Culture Center (Maspons, 6), o living mangers like that of the Navy.
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The great charm of christmas markets it is that they belong to the field of illusion. Nothing like sinking your hands in the moss of the historic stops Sagrada Familia Christmas Fair, abstract between ‘caganers’ Y mangers of cork soaked in the crowd of the Santa Llúcia Fair, or discover the stops of the 7ª Responsible Consumption Fair under the bright tent of Plaza Catalunya. That world of endearing shopkeepers, traditional figures, fancy ornaments and lucky mistletoe picks you up from the traffic and rough corners of the city. You look at that bulging-eyed ‘guy’ and a feeling of travel and enchantment invades you, as if you were in another era. Ah, Christmas.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com