the roof of the Vapor Aymerich, Amat i Jover (architect, Lluís Muncunill)
Terrassa: 214,000 inhabitants and the fourth largest city in Catalonia, but you haven’t heard of it. Forget Barcelona, iced by the modernista architect Gaudí – but with signs, in English, forbidding urinating in public. Forget the quaint fishing village of Calella de Palafrugell, and the Costa Brava – with its multilingual waiters. Terrassa is the real Catalonia, untainted by tourists.
But being authentic has its downside. Think: the Spanish equivalent of Basingstoke. After all, Basingstoke is authentically English – though not many people’s destination of choice. So why did we pick a holiday in suburbia? Because it was free, literally. We had signed up for a house swop, without worrying too much about the details.
On our first day we walked to where we thought the town centre should be, through anonymous housing estates, past tawdry rows of shops and their fast-food “Frankfurts”. Their ubiquity might well explain the excessive number of dental clinics, but fails completely to account for the laser epilation parlours. (more…)
