I am Catalan. Catalonia had the first democratic parliament, well before England did. And the first United Nations were in my country. At that time – the Eleventh Century – there was a meeting in Toluges – now France – to talk about peace, because in that epoch Catalans were already against, against war.

Pau (Pablo) Casals, cellist and conductor, at the United Nations, 1971

 

Barcelona’s bustling, tree-lined Ramblas boulevard is a boisterous fusion of noise, colour and activity. Herds of pedestrians push their way past the squawking menageries at the exotic birds stalls and the bright, sweet-smelling flower stalls. Circles of spectators form around dancing, juggling and fire-eating street entertainers. Human statues stand silent watch as teenage Moroccan bag-snatchers weave through the crowds and, at the port end, a handful of dumpy, cheap prostitutes pitch for business.

I know of no other city where a single street is so important. From sex shops and souvenir stalls to the opera house and, in La Boqueria, the best fresh food market in Spain, Las Ramblas caters – in one way or another – for the most elemental desires of life. This is where Barcelona celebrates, protests and riots. Built over the course of a stinking stream once known as the Cagalell – the Stream of Shit – it is, more importantly, where Barcelona meets itself. For it is almost impossible, in one of the densest cities in the Mediterranean, for one Barcelonés to walk down Las Ramblas without seeing another he or she knows.

I have lived in this city before. There was a time when I, too, would meet people I knew as I walked down the Ramblas. Coming back, I find the people have changed. There is more variety. I can hear Arabic and Urdu, most of the languages of Europe and others from Africa and Asia. Some of the castellano is being spoken with Latin American accents. Barcelona, I realise, has become a city of immigrants. The Ramblas does not care. It is as noisy and busy as ever.

Looking at all these new people pumping fresh life into the Ramblas, I question why I have come here. I am looking for just one language and one identity, Catalan. Are Catalans, whose capital city this is, really as different from other Spaniards as they claim? Are they, as a growing minority argue, not really Spaniards at all? Already the Ramblas is making my questions feel too parochial, too inward-looking.

At carnival time Las Ramblas ramps up its innate capacity for spectacle. The already colourful boulevard is swallowed up by a long procession of clowns, horse-drawn carts, floats, musicians, mounted police, acrobats, dancers, giants, strange creatures with monstrously large heads – the cabezudos, or ‘big-heads’ – and thousands of costumed revellers. These are accompanied by excited groups of children – and quite a few excited adults – scampering after the boiled sweets that rain down like confetti from carriages and floats. The first time I watched it, I found myself shamelessly fighting with four-year-olds for my share.

The best place to see the carnival procession when it comes down the Ramblas is from the windows of the Palau Moja. A solid, imposing eighteenth-century city palace, it is now home to the culture department of the Generalitat of Catalonia, the regional government. One year I watched from its wrought-iron balconies as, below my feet, the carnival procession dissolved under a sudden downpour of rain. The heavens rumbled. The skies opened. Sodden devils, tottering giants and wobbling big-heads ran for cover. It was a wash-out.

With the procession suddenly over, a friendly cultural bureaucrat showed me around the Palau Moja. When we reached the sumptuous, double-height, frescoed ballroom, he let me into a secret. ‘Do you know our national Catalan poet, Jacint Verdaguer?’ he asked. ‘This is where they say he went mad.’ The great late-nineteenth-century poet-priest Verdaguer, Catalonia’s own ‘national’ poet, had lived in this palace, on the pay-roll of a wealthy marquis. Towards the end of his life, my host told me, he had taken to performing bizarre exorcism rituals. Demons, Verdaguer had been convinced, were stalking their way through Barcelona’s huddled masses. His behaviour had become increasingly bizarre. The bishops, Barcelona’s upper-middle-class burguesía and upright Catalans turned their backs on a man whose lengthy, Catalan-language epics to his homeland – especially the Canigó – had made him a sort of Catalan Tennyson. He was the towering figure of a prolonged renaissance – the Renaixença – of poetry and writing in the Catalan language. His genius had been recognised outside Catalonia. Unamuno considered him Spain’s finest living poet. Yet some of Verdaguer’s final writings – on exorcism – were rumoured to be kept firmly under lock and key, my host confided.

It was meant to be a piece of cotilleo, a titillating jewel of cultural gossip, to be shared in private. Innocently, I got the message wrong. This, I declared, was a great subject for a newspaper article, or even a book. My host’s face fell. I had misunderstood. It would, he said, be wrong to broadcast this story. When I asked why, he struggled for a bit and then declared: ‘That would be like saying William Shakespeare was mad!’ I wanted to point out that, worse than that, Shakespeare stood accused of not even writing his own plays. I held my tongue, however. Verdaguer, I realised, was one of those untouchable ‘national’ symbols of Catalonia – a place which, depending on who you spoke to, was either just one more Spanish region, a nation within a state, or a country whose state had been stolen from it.

Verdaguer is part of a whole pantheon of Catalan holy cows. He is accompanied by such varied ‘national’ symbols as the Catalan language itself, the black-skinned image of the Virgin of Montserrat, a ninth-century count called Wilfred the Hairy, the Generalitat itself and, even, the blaugrana – claret and blue – shirt of Barcelona football club.

Catalans are, on the whole, convinced they are different from other Spaniards. They have a name for that difference. It is the ‘hecho diferencial’ – the differentiating fact. This not only makes them different in the way that, for example, an Andalusian southerner is from an Asturian northerner. It is a qualitative leap. Catalans, it means, are more different than others (except, most would agree, the Basques).

I have come back to Barcelona having set myself the task of finding out exactly what this hecho diferencial is. The trouble is that there is no single, defining hecho to point to. Is it in there amongst all these carefully cosseted symbols? Is it something to do with Catalonia’s history as a fifteenth-century Mediterranean power that never quite made it into the modern era? Is it their different character? The Generalitat – in one of those outbursts of unabashed Catalan self-obsession that so annoy other Spaniards – has defined the latter itself. Catalans, its publicity material tells me, are seen as ‘well-mannered, hard-working, thrifty, enterprising, and generally prudent – with a bit of ‘seny i rauxa’ (literally ‘common sense and madness’)’.

Catalans speak a different language to other Spaniards, but then so, too, do Valencians, Majorcans and Galicians. Catalonia has had counts and kings of its own, but then so, too, have Navarre and León. It has its own medieval architecture, but so does Andalucía. Perhaps the hecho diferencial is the sum of all these things?

Whatever it is, the idea has often provoked ire elsewhere in Spain. ‘I notify those of the hecho diferencial that they have been defeated by force of arms and that, if they want to be brothers with other Spaniards, we will impose on them the law of the victor because … we consider the hechos diferenciales are also finished,’ one of Franco’s generals, Alonso Vega, warned at the end of the Civil War in 1939.

When I first came to live in Barcelona twenty years ago, I was blissfully ignorant of these things. A love story gone wrong had brought me here. Recently finished at university, I had planned to move to Madrid with a girlfriend as I attempted to add some languages to my qualifications. But, a few weeks before we were due to leave, we split up. I chose Barcelona for a reason that, I would discover, was one of its defining characteristics. It was not Madrid.

Barcelona was, of course, different then, in the mid-1980s. It still had a rough, port air to it. Quinquis, small-time crooks and pickpockets, were a threat on Las Ramblas and in the old city. Transvestite prostitutes did nightly sentry duty on the street corners of the Rambla de Catalunya, the extension of the Ramblas away from the sea. Gypsies would set up fold-out tables on street corners and rip you off with the timo de los trileros, enticing you to bet on which of three upturned cups or walnut shells hid a pea or a small plastic ball. You walked carefully, or not at all, through the Barrio Chino – the densely populated red light district on one side of the Ramblas. I spent my first couple of weeks in a rundown hostal in a charming but dilapidated square off the Ramblas. The Plaza Real had palm trees, peeling paintwork, a leaky fountain, a dozen drug-dealers and a weekly market in what looked distinctly like stolen goods.

I was looking for a job. I wore my hair short, my shirts almost ironed and a suit. The plaza low-life left me alone. In retrospect, I realised, this was because I looked like one of those clean-cut young American evangelists who, even today, pound the streets of Spanish cities seeking converts. I saw my first knife-fight in the plaza. Two drug-peddlers wove circles around one another, blades in hand. I did not stop to see the result, but I recall being impressed by the way they wound their denim jackets around one arm as protection. I saw a second knife fight – two men tumbling around the wasteland behind La Boqueria market. Somehow, it never seemed as though these people were going to kill one another or even do significant damage. When an American warship visited, the sailors disappeared into the Barrio Chino and went home without their wallets. I read in the newspaper that these, empty of money, were found piled up at the foot of the gangway the next morning. A good pickpocket, I was told, made sure you got your ID card and family photos back. Barcelona was like that. It felt dangerous, but not deadly. It was sophisticated, decaying and sinful. It had an edge. It was perfect.

I bumped into my first ‘differentiating fact’ when I found a flat-share. The tiny apartment was just off the main square of Gràcia, a barrio of low – two, three and four storey – buildings. I shared with Sònia, a student from Andorra, and her Catalan boyfriend, Xavier. They, to my initial annoyance, spoke Catalan to one another – though they always addressed me in castellano. In fact, I soon found, half of my new friends spoke Catalan. All were, again, scrupulously careful to speak castellano if there was someone present, like me, who did not understand them.

On one side of Gràcia’s square was the barrio’s ‘town’ hall. Big-bellied, armed city policemen (they are all armed in Spain) stood guard outside. A large, brick clock tower stood in the middle of the small plaza. On the other side stood three or four small-time drug-dealers. Spain was living through the anything-goes days of early socialism. The cops left the drug-dealers alone. People smoked their small blocks of Moroccan hashish at the cafe tables set out in the square. In those days, as Spain experimented with its new-found, post-Franco freedoms, people rolled-up and smoked almost anywhere – in bars, on street benches, in the metro. Waiters had to navigate the traffic of Vespa mopeds, the yellow and black, bumble-bee-coloured taxis and the groaning butano, gas bottle, lorries to get to our tables in the square. I learned to drink cremat – blazing dark rum with coffee beans and lemon peel roasting in its alcoholic fumes.

I walked up the narrow staircase of our three-storey building to the flat, red-tiled roof. I lay in the sun and read Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Los Mares del Sur. Vázquez Montalbán’s detective, Pepe Carvalho, showed me around the city without my having to move. From the posh heights of Pedralbes, at the top of the one-sided cauldron that is Barcelona, to the stewing mass of the Barrio Chino, he gave me a feeling for my new home. Carvalho, an avid gastronome, even took me on exotic fictional shopping trips to La Boqueria – with its displays of octopus, bulging-eyed sea bream, sheep’s brains and fat, white Catalan sausages. It was late summer when I moved in. There seemed no need for central heating. In January, however, snow settled on the city’s palm trees. We took the gas ring and the butano bottle out of the kitchen and put it in our tiny sitting room. We sat round it with our coats on, warming our hands.

I found work teaching English. I studied at the city’s university and at the Brazilian Institute on the top floor of the Casa Amatller – a beautiful modernist building on the Paseo de Gràcia. Looking out of the window I could gaze upon what some Catalans would describe as further evidence of their ‘difference’. Paseo de Gràcia is home to some of the best work of Barcelona’s emblematic architect, the turn-of-the-century modernist Antoni Gaudí. I could see the strange organic forms and Darth Vader-shaped chimneys above the sculpted, soot-encrusted stone facade of Gaudí’s Casa Milà – long ago dubbed La Pedrera, the Stone Quarry. Gaudí’s Casa Batlló was next door. Its scaly, undulating, ceramic-tiled roof represents the dragon slain by Catalonia’s patron saint, Sant Jordi. It was, and is, breathtaking stuff – a lesson in how adventurous and imaginative the Catalan mind could be.

I walked everywhere. Stepping on Gaudí’s jellyfish, conch-shell and starfish-decorated hexagonal tiles on the Paseo de Gràcia, gravity pulled me down to the Ramblas. It was a short hop from there to the narrow, dark, medieval, washing-adorned streets, tiny squares and austere, voluminous stone churches of the Gothic Quarter.

Barcelona recognised that it could not match the wild movida that Madrid was enjoying at that stage of the 1980s, but it was still intent on having a good time. On weekend evenings I wandered out to the squares of Gràcia. I knew I would always bump into someone, be invited to sit down and have a night out. Even then, though, the city was changing. Barcelona was ambitious to recover its lost glories. Gràcia’s squares, some little more than strips of baked mud, were being dug up. New ones, all smooth concrete paving blocks, chrome railings and futuristic street lamps, would appear in their place. Something similar was happening to bars and night-clubs. Most were still seedy or sleazy. Some were full of men with big moustaches picking up part-time prostitutes to the sound of 1970s disco. One had a mini-golf course in its garden. Another had tables made of coffins and flashed a slide-show of human organs – hearts, kidneys, livers – onto a bare wall. It was a Barcelona version of counter-culture. New clubs, however, were big, open and slickly designed. The clientele was silently cool, busy looking and being seen. Catalans, I learnt, cared deeply about how things looked – starting with themselves.

I ate lots of botifarra, a Catalan sausage, with mongetes, white haricot beans. On Sundays I went down to the rabbit-warren of ramshackle restaurants on the beach to eat arròs negre, rice cooked in squid ink. I wrote my first magazine article on the British vedettes who danced topless at the theatres on the Paralelo – El Molino, the Arnau – or, with more glitter, at the Scala on passeig de Sant Joan. I never dared enter the Sala Bagdad, which had live sex acts that, legend had it, had once included a donkey.

I found my next Catalan national symbol at, of all places, a football match. I was not the only new Englishman in town. Gary Lineker had signed for F.C. Barcelona. I went to the biggest football stadium I had ever seen, the Camp Nou, to watch him play his first match against Racing de Santander. I expected thunderous noise from the 115,000 fans in Europe’s biggest soccer stadium. But the Camp Nou was remarkably quiet. Instead of the bellowing and singing I had encountered in British stadiums, the fans standing around me formed little tertulias discussing the technical merits of the players and the failings of the coach. Barça fans, I discovered, always knew better than the coach. Lineker scored twice. The fans approved. They seemed to like the season’s other British signing, Mark Hughes, just as much – pronouncing him to be una tanqueta, a little tank. I had found a club to support. But Barça, as people told me repeatedly, was ‘more than a club’. I had bought into what was, in effect, the Catalan national team. It did not seem to matter that most players were not – and, increasingly, are not – Catalan. Under Franco, supporting Barça had been one of the only ways to show outward hostility towards him – and ‘his’ team, Real Madrid – and support for Catalonia. It was still the main popular emblem of war against the old enemy – Madrid.

I was having a good time, but mainly I was here to learn a language, Spanish. To my surprise, my new friends were also studying a language. It was their own, Catalan. For the first few weeks it was difficult to tell the difference between this and what I learned to call not español, Spanish, but castellano, Castilian. Catalan sounded drier, more clipped. It was both less exuberant and less coarse. Sometimes it sounded a bit like French. Half of my new friends spoke it at home. Few, however, knew how to write it properly. They had done their schooling in Spanish. Franco had banned Catalan from schools, universities and a vast array of official forums. Franco wanted national unity ‘with a single language, Castilian, and a single personality, that of Spain’. My new friends had left school a few years after his death. That was before responsibility for education was handed over to the Generalitat and radical changes – too radical for some – were introduced. I was impressed by their diligence. They went to night classes. They were shocked at their own ignorance. They could not spell. They did not know the rules of Catalan grammar. Shame drove them to study harder. Other friends, born and bred in Barcelona to families who had migrated here from other parts of Spain, did not speak a word of Catalan. Nor did they want to.

A gradual linguistic change was taking place on the street, too. Street names were slowly being changed from Castilian to Catalan. In practical terms it was often a question of changing a few letters. Calle became carrer, avenida became avinguda and paseo appeared as passeig. The street called Paralelo changed, intriguingly, to Paral.lel. Written down, Catalan looked more like Spanish than it sounded when spoken. The big state enterprises – railways, post office and the phone company – refused, however, to follow suit. People would graffiti Catalan words over signs in railway stations, and on post or phone boxes. The protests were mostly good-humoured. Pink paint was a favourite weapon. Separatist protesters sometimes stopped outside the McDonald’s on Las Ramblas. ‘¡Botifarra si! ¡Hamburguesa no!’ they cried. If all they were worried about was Catalan sausages, the chances of catalanismo turning violent seemed slim.

Catalans did not seem cut out for violence. Terra Lliure, a Catalan attempt to emulate ETA, failed so badly that all it managed to do was kneecap a journalist, blow up three of its own members by mistake and kill an innocent woman in the town of Les Borges Blanques by blowing a wall down on her. It dissolved itself in 1995 after fifteen fruitless years and covered in anything but glory.

One day I walked up a scruffy wooden staircase and knocked on a door bearing a sign that read: ‘Crida a la Solidaritat’, ‘Call to Solidarity’. There was a complicated telephone entry system. Crida was a Catalan-language pressure group. Their main weapon was the aerosol can. The people at their offices, however, were jumpy. A few months earlier a man had walked through the same door with a false nose, a pistol and a bomb. He had forced everybody out and then exploded the small bomb. I walked away with a map of Europe that looked like none I had ever seen before. It was a map of stateless peoples and minority languages. The normal frontiers of Europe disappeared. Replacing the countries were languages and regions which, in some cases, I had never heard of. A large slice of southern France, for example, was now called Occitania. Spain itself was divided up into more than half a dozen bits, including Asturias, Aragón and Andalucía. The Catalans occupied a long wedge of Mediterranean coast, more than twice the size of what I knew as the Spanish region of Catalonia. The new Catalonia started somewhere near the French city of Perpignan. It stretched west into Aragón and tapered south, via Valencia, to a stiletto point somewhere after Alicante. There were island outposts, too. All the Balearics were coloured Catalan. There was even an outpost on the Italian island of Sardinia at a town Catalans called L’Alguer.

The northern part of this region on the map coincided roughly with what, at the beginning of the ninth century under Charlemagne, was called the Spanish March. The rest was a reminder of how the Aragonese kings who – despite their title – were based in Barcelona and spoke Catalan had built a fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Mediterranean empire that stretched to Sicily. Amongst their most infamous exports to Italy was a family of Catalan Popes – the despotic and debauched Borgias.

The dialects spoken in other places are not known as Catalan. They are valencià, mallorquí, menorquí, etc. In one of the more pointless rows in modern Spain, the Valencian regional government has fought for its version of Catalan to be recognised as a separate language. This is considered absurd by linguists. In an attempt to placate them, however, the Spanish government came up with two identical translations of the European Constitution – one marked ‘Catalan’, the other marked ‘Valencian’. Language, like history, is political stuff in Spain.

I did not learn to speak it, but I began to feel a creeping sympathy for this language. Catalan had been repressed or persecuted, on and off, for almost three centuries. Successive Spanish kings had tried to encourage it to disappear from the early eighteenth century onwards. Two dictators, Primo de Rivera and Franco, had done their best to squash it in the twentieth century. There were, however, still meant to be more than seven million Catalan speakers – more than either Danish or Norwegian. But how could it compete with castellano, a language with 330 million speakers world-wide?

I did not realise just how hard some Catalans were prepared to fight. A new Catalan semi-autonomous regional government had been set up in 1979. This was revival of a Generalitat that, barring a brief reappearance between 1931 and 1939 – had not existed since 1714. One of the first lines of the new Generalitat’s statute said, in Catalan, ‘La llengua pròpia de Catalunya és el català’, ‘Catalan is the language of Catalonia.’ At the time, this was more a wish than a reality. Some serious social engineering was required to make it true. Half of all Catalans spoke Spanish as their first, or only, language. All spoke Spanish but, in 1975, only 60 per cent could speak Catalan (compared to 75 per cent in 1930). A language crusade was launched, which continues to this day.

For the first quarter century of its life the Generalitat was run by a Catalan nationalist called Jordi Pujol. He stated that the predominance of castellano was the result of ‘an ancient act of violence’. Pujol set out on a process that was given the unfortunately Orwellian-sounding name of normalització, normalisation. The main idea was to replace Castilian with Catalan as the language of education. Linguists say that, if you speak Spanish, you are already 80 per cent of the way to speaking Catalan, and vice versa – so it did not raise many practical problems. With castellano as the language of the schoolyard, television, pop music and the street, it was hardly going to be lost. Some people, however, did not like the idea of their children being ‘normalised’. It was, they said, not just a reversal of the policies of Franco. It was the mirror image of them.

I left Barcelona, and Spain, after two years. The city, however, stayed – and, along with its football team, stays – in my heart. Five years later I came back to live here again. Barcelona was preparing to host the 1992 Olympic Games. It was bursting with energy, pride and self-importance. The first two, at least, were infectious. There were other differences too. It was less seedy. Some of the world’s biggest architectural names – Frank Gehry, Norman Foster and Arata Isozaki – were at work. Glittering new modern buildings were going up.

Barcelona had become smarter and cooler, if more boring. The edge had gone. The sexiest things to be now were either a designer, an architect or a town planner. There can be no other city in the world where the latter has achieved such status. Advertising is another of Barcelona’s specialities. ‘Barcelona, posa’t guapa’, ‘Doll yourself up!’ the city hall urged, appealing to the natural vanity of Spain’s trendiest, best-turned-out people. It scrubbed up well – renewing much of its modernista facade – for the games. Olympic Barcelona also, however, saw the start of a long, and continuing, Barcelona obsession with transient design trends. At one club the urinals had stroboscopic lights triggered by the jets of urine aimed at them. Your piss blinked back at you.

I found a tiny flat on top of a nineteenth-century apartment block near the all-night flower market in a part of town known as the Eixample. An idealistic nineteenth-century city planner, Ildefons Cerdà had traced out a neat grid of streets here with each square filled by a block known as a manzana, an apple. Where the core of the apple was meant to be, Cerdà had proposed gardens, parks and schools. Property speculators had eaten the cores up years before. My flat was on the roof – where the doorman of our block had lived before he was replaced by an electric buzzer. I furnished it with old chairs, cupboards and tables that people left out once a month for the municipal rubbish collectors. I had to get onto the street before the gypsies came past, throwing the best stuff into their vans. It was heavy, old-fashioned furniture. Getting it upstairs was backbreaking work. There were seven floors of steps up to my rooftop flat but no lift. (A heavily pregnant woman came for lunch, climbed the stairs and gave birth soon after getting back down to street level.) My terrace was the building’s roof – about four times the size of my flat. When the city lit bonfires and shot tons of fireworks into the sky to celebrate the eve of Sant Joan and the summer solstice, I sat out drinking cava – Catalan champagne – as fizzled-out rockets rained down onto the rooftop around me. Barcelona was still magical.

There were linguistic changes, too. The railway company and utilities were now using Catalan. Some friends now spoke Catalan to one another in the office – though they wrote up their meetings in Castilian. By now some two-thirds of Catalans said they could speak the language. More people answered my phone calls with the abrupt Catalan command ‘¡Digui!’ which means ‘Speak!’ but sounds like ‘Diggy!’

Generalitat-run Catalan television, which had been finding its feet when I first came, now had two channels and good viewing figures. Many people were listening to, or watching, their news exclusively in Catalan – on television or radio. Catalans were getting a different view of the world to other Spaniards.

Something special happened in Barcelona over a fortnight in the summer of 1992. Barcelona had won the right to host the Olympic Games partly because one of the city’s own sons, Juan Antonio Samaranch, was president of the International Olympic Committee. The city knew how to design the kind of games Samaranch wanted. Both the man and the city got it right. Barcelona’s games were a success. Barcelonans felt, and acted, like hosts to the world. More than 30,000 people became Olympic volunteers. They were proud of what they had, and they wanted to show it off. They put the Olympics, in the doldrums after decades of financial disasters and Cold War bickering, back on track.

A former senior Catalan Francoist, Samaranch was ideally suited to his job. The pseudo-democratic Olympic decision-making processes, conducted by minor princes, faded sports stars and sporting bureaucrats, must have been highly familiar. He is a difficult figure for Catalans. He is that most desirable thing – an internationally important Catalan. He is also, however, something that is not meant to have existed – a Catalan Francoist. There are old photos of him in the uniform of the Movimiento, shaking hands with the Caudillo or giving stiff-armed fascist salutes.

Catalonia, Catalans are mostly convinced, was always anti-Francoist. The Francoists and Falangists were ‘ocupantes’, occupiers from elsewhere. Dictatorship was a Castilian invention. A true Catalan would never have supported the Caudillo. It was an idea that Catalans took to almost as soon as the dictator was in his grave. ‘On the one hand, the Francoists wanted to disappear from the map so nobody would make them pay and so they could reappear, protected by olvido (forgetting), years later. On the other hand, the emerging catalanismo needed to present the image of a homogenous country,’ the Catalan writer Arcadi Espada explains. ‘It was a country determined to prove to itself that it had been good, beautiful and sacred – without fissures, without Francoists. A blanket of silence covered the nation.’

Even when gunning for Franco, Catalans are remarkably shy about naming their own. I found further evidence of this in a book written to prove how badly the Catalan language had been treated – Catalan, a language under siege. It informed me that Antonio Tovar, the Madrid academic who masterminded Franco’s 1940s crackdown on Catalan, ‘had a number of intellectuals in Catalonia who were his allies’. Rather than tell me who they were, however, the authors coyly declared that these were ‘names we will not mention because some are still alive’. It was okay, in other words, to name Madrid Francoists, but not one’s own.

Reading Anna Funder’s study of East Germany under communism, Stasiland, I found that East Germans had a similar attitude to Hitler and Nazism. ‘History was so quickly remade, and so successfully, that it can truly be said that easterners did not feel then, and do not feel now, that they were the same Germans as those responsible for Hitler’s regime,’ Funder says. She calls it the ‘innocence manoeuvre’. Just how innocent, I wondered, had Catalans really been? The answer, one prominent Catalan publisher explained, has yet to be written.

Catalans have always shown an ability to adapt themselves to circumstance. In the eighteenth century their aristocrats upped sticks and moved to Madrid. Their chameleon nature was noted by George Orwell when he arrived in 1936 to fight in the Civil War. ‘Down the Ramblas … the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist … Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform … I did not realise that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being,’ he wrote in his Homage to Catalonia.

Catalans were indignant when the head of Spain’s Constitutional Court, Manuel Jiménez de Parga, recently claimed they had welcomed Franco with open arms when he visited in 1972. ‘Few places welcomed Franco with the enthusiasm shown by the Catalans,’ he said. It was a blatant piece of Catalan-baiting which, predictably, worked. As for history, Jiménez de Parga would later claim that, in the year 1000, his native Andalucía (then Muslim) boasted fountains of coloured or perfumed water while other self-proclaimed ‘historic communities’ in Spain ‘did not even know what washing themselves at the weekend was’. Pujol tried to take him to court.

After the Olympics, I left Barcelona for Madrid. Of all the great rivalries between all the great cities of Europe, few can summon up the bile that Spain’s biggest cities – which are almost equal in size – reserve for one another. Up to now I had only ever experienced the rivalry from one end. Barcelona, according to this story, was always the victim. Madrid was always the villain. I had noticed, however, that Sergio, a Barcelona friend whose company car had a Madrid licence plate, always made sure it was in a car park in the days before a Real Madrid–Barcelona match. ‘I don’t want it scratched,’ he explained.

In Madrid, I found, people often threw up their hands at the mention of Catalans. ‘If they want to go, let them!’ said one. ‘To think we used to sing their songs,’ said another, referring to the protest songs that a generation of Madrileños had learned to sing, in Catalan, in the final years of Franco.

A few months later the so-called ‘Guerra de la Llengua’, the ‘Language War’, broke out. This was a rebellion against linguistic normalisation. A group of mothers in the resort town of Salou set up an association to lobby for less Catalan at school. They demanded the right to choose, as Basque parents could, between schools that taught mainly in Catalan and schools that taught mainly in Castilian. One night, one of their leaders, Asunción García, claimed to have been kidnapped and beaten. Her car was torched. A group of intellectuals, from both the left and the right, set up something called the Foro of Babel. They called the Generalitat’s linguistic policies ‘xenophobic and reactionary’. They, in turn, were accused, in semantic overkill, of being ‘the intellectual heirs of those who sought to commit genocide against Catalan during the Franco regime’. The other allegation, which revealed that the strains between Catalonia and its migrant working classes were by no means new, was of a phenomenon that strikes fear into good bourgeois Catalan hearts, lerrouxismo.

The left-wing populist Alejandro Lerroux had been the ‘Emperor of the Paralelo’ at the start of the twentieth century when that area of Barcelona housed the city’s immigrant slums. Barcelona already had a reputation as the capital of European anarchism. Anarchists and paid pistol-wielding assassins employed by factory owners fought a dirty war against one another. Regional nationalism in Catalonia has traditionally been a strongly bourgeois thing, so this was, to a certain degree, the nationalist class protecting itself against the immigrant masses who laboured in mills and factories.

Italian Giuseppe Fanelli – a friend of the great anarchist theorist Mikhail Bakunin – had introduced anarchism to Spain in 1869. It spread like wildfire through Barcelona’s shanty towns and the countryside of Andalucía. Spain was the only country where anarchism truly took off. In the 1890s Barcelona’s anarchists became Spain’s first bomb-throwers. The most spectacular attack came in 1893 when a young man called Santiago Salvador tossed two bombs down from the cheap seats at the Liceu opera house in the Ramblas during a performance of Rossini’s William Tell. They landed in the stalls, amongst the rich of a city whose upper classes had grown fat on the almost slave labour of their factories. Twenty-two were killed. Salvador and five other anarchists were garrotted. He shouted ‘Long live anarchy!’ before the iron collar of the garrotte – a very Spanish invention – tightened slowly around his neck.

Lerroux arrived on the scene a few years after the Liceu attack. He was a great, angry hater. He hated the Church, the monarchy and Barcelona’s upper classes of industrialists and bankers. Most of all, however, he hated Catalanistas. His followers were known as the ‘the young Barbarians’. When the city rebelled against a general call-up to send troops to Morocco in 1909, they led a week of violent rampaging. The Tragic Week, as it was called, remains seared into Catalonia’s political memory. Some eighty churches, monasteries, convents and church schools were sacked or burnt. Mummified corpses of nuns were pulled out of crypts and put on display. Lerrouxismo has terrified Catalonia ever since.

My search for Catalonia’s ‘different’ soul took me onto the outdoor escalators than run up the side of a Barcelona hill called Montjuïc to the National Museum of Catalan Art. This, in the words of one of its first directors, was established in order to ‘construct a history of its own for Catalan art … that will allow us to show the differences that exist between Catalan art and hispanic or foreign art’. As museums around the world looked for connections between all kinds of art, Catalonia had decided to use its greatest gallery to look inward. The choice of building – a neo-classical monster known as the Palau Nacional – was apt for the stated aim of the project. It had been built, in the years of dictator Primo de Rivera, for the 1929 International Expo – a patriotic attempt to impress Spain’s brilliance on the world. It took fourteen years to turn into the shining new symbol of a different nation, Catalonia. The museum finally opened all its spaces in 2004.

The result, I find, is both tasteful and spectacular. Whatever the original intentions, it does not seem to be about seeking ‘differences between Catalan art’ and ‘foreign art’. Perhaps the curators, when it came down to it, realised that it was ridiculous to apply absolute frontiers to art. If anything, those who finally put it together after the ex-director was moved on have been careful to show how local art fits in with the rest of Europe. The museum’s jewels are a series of Romanesque wall paintings dating back to the eleventh century. They are taken from churches high in the folds of the Pyrenees – especially the valley of the River Boí. Experts ripped them out in the 1920s, fearing they would fade and disappear. They were brought to Barcelona, to be installed in what has now become the MNAC. Art critic Robert Hughes has pronounced this place to be ‘to wall painting what Venice and Ravenna are to the art of mosaic’. He adds, however, that: ‘It seems unlikely these murals were painted by locals.’

Art is one of those things Barcelona and Madrid like to squabble over. In the first half of the twentieth century Barcelona produced some of the most remarkable artists of the time. The modernismo of Gaudí and his fellow architects was accompanied by that of artists like Santiago Rusiñol and Ramón Casas. They looked to Europe and loved all things modern. Like Gaudí, however, they also looked back at the Romanesque, at the twelfth-century Cistercian monasteries of the Catalan countryside and at Barcelona’s own, unique, Gothic architecture. Their headquarters, in true Spanish style, was a bar – Els Quatre Gats, The Four Cats. A teenage Pablo Picasso who, although born in Málaga, spent his formative years in Barcelona – was welcomed here. One of his first exhibitions sat on the café’s walls.

Picasso had been studying – and his father teaching – at the fine-art school lodged in the top floor of the fourteenth-century Llotja, the old stock exchange. Another pupil there was Joan Miró, who started off painting the countryside and farms of his father’s native Tarragona before moving on to Paris and surrealism.

The mad, moustachioed, paranoid surrealist Salvador Dalí was a notary’s son from that most conservative of Catalan places, Figueres. When Dalí died it was found that he had recently changed his will. Instead of giving his work to the Generalitat, he donated it to the Spanish state. Catalans cried foul, claiming Dali had been manipulated into changing the will at the last moment. The inventor of the so-called paranoid critical method left behind him a museum installed alongside his old Torre Galatea house. He had topped it with giant eggs and encrusted, on the outside, plaster imitations of Catalan bread rolls. It is now one the most visited museums in Spain. Dalí is perhaps the last person to have willingly sported a barretina, the sock-length, floppy red beret of the Catalan peasant. Some catalanistas prefer to forget his enthusiasm for Spain. This included highly formative years in the company of the poet Lorca and film-maker Buñuel as a Madrid student. It also included a fawning reverence for Franco.

A comic tug-of-war between Madrid and Catalonia involved that unlikely-sounding symbol of national pride – Dalí’s The Great Masturbator. Catalan separatists insisted in the Madrid parliament that the picture, currently hanging in Madrid’s Reina Sofía museum, should be returned to Figueres.

I was not convinced that art – however brilliant the things produced here were – was proof of a defining national characteristic for the Catalans, so I decided to look elsewhere. Nationalism and religion always seem to go together. This is especially so in Spain – National Catholicism was, after all, the name given to Franco’s political ideas. It is as if each ‘nation’ needs, apart from its symbols, some sort of spiritual home. In Catalonia that home is to be found on the extraordinary-looking, towering outcrop of rocks known as Montserrat, the Serrated Mountain.

Montserrat must have provoked wonder in those who set eyes on it long before the temple that is considered the religious soul of Catalonia was established here in the eleventh century. The jumble of upright, rounded peaks here are unlike any rock formations nearby. From far off it looks like a dumping ground for giant menhirs, stacked as tight as space allows. Closer up, they look like the weathered backs of the carved stone gods of Easter Island. Catalans call it ‘the Sacred Mountain’. Legend has it that a statue of the Virgin Mary was found in a cave here at the end of the ninth century. True, or not, there were, by the year 900, four separate chapels tucked into the hillside. The main Benedictine monastery was founded in 1025. A Montserrat monk, Bernat Boïl, travelled with Columbus to the Americas, giving this mountain’s name to a Caribbean island along the way.

The original buildings were ravaged by man. Most of the monastery was destroyed by Napoleon’s troops in 1811. It later suffered temporary disestablishment. During the Spanish Civil War, it was saved from being looted and razed by anarchists thanks to the Catalan regional government – though twenty-three monks were killed. Its current facade, made of polished rock from the mountain, was not finished until 1968. The symbols of Catalonia, especially the red and gold striped flag, are to be found discreetly draped around the monastery. The most important feature here, however, is another Catalan symbol. It is a statue of the Virgin Mary. Almost uniquely, the Virgin of Montserrat is black – probably the result of too much exposure to candle-smoke rather than design. Her nickname is ‘la moreneta’, or ‘the little dark girl’. On the folds of her golden robe sits a crowned child Jesus, also with a darkened face. A queue of visitors wishing to meet her stretches out of the monastery doors. They are waiting to kiss her right hand, which holds a sphere representing the universe. Anyone doubting her significance should come here on the weekend after Barcelona football team, that other symbol of Catalan pride, wins a major trophy. The trophy is brought here, to receive her blessing.

Montserrat has a reputation for producing rebellious monks. Under Franco, the monks continued to talk, read, write and preach in Catalan. In 1962 the then Abbot, Escarré, became one of the first church rebels by giving an interview to Le Monde in which he accused Franco of being a bad Catholic. A famous protest saw three hundred Catalan intellectuals lock themselves inside the chapel in 1970 while Franco’s police sat helplessly outside. Even then, though, many of this self-styled gauche divine, divine left, were champagne radicals. Barcelona’s Bocaccio nightclub delivered salmon sandwiches to keep them going. Franco knew he dare not touch the place. Jordi Pujol’s Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya party was founded here and, as its propaganda eagerly points out, this was where he married.

Today the monastery’s ninety monks include respected experts on the Catalan language, with their publishing house producing seminal works. They remain, however, an argumentative bunch. Recent reports suggest there has been a bout of infighting. Older, more strident catalanistas have, it is said, been moved on. One newspaper claimed they had lost out in a factional power struggle that involved a clique of gay monks.

I find Montserrat dull and uninspiring. The singing of a wonderful boy’s choir – the oldest in Europe – fails to cheer me up. It is too new, too much a place for coach parties and day-trippers with foil-wrapped bocadillos. It has a cable car and a funicular railway. There are restaurants, gift shops and a post office. It feels like a religious-nationalist theme park. Catholicism and nationalism are, together, a spooky phenomenon, especially in a Spain that can recall Franco’s version of it. I think of another Benedictine monastery with a choir school and a nationalist aura that I have visited recently – at Franco’s Valley of the Fallen. My soul, Montserrat reminds me, is neither Catholic nor Catalan.

I drive on to another Catalan monastery. I have no trouble, however, feeling the pull of Santa María de Poblet. As I arrive the sun is going down and an icy wind is blowing through the neighbouring vineyards. The tourists have gone. The walls of the vast monastery complex, sitting under the wooded slopes of the Prades hills, emit a warm, pinkish-ochre glow as they catch the reflections of the day’s final rays. This is one of three Cistercian monasteries – the others are at Santes Creus and Vallbona de les Monges – built in the Catalan countryside in the twelfth century as the Moors were rolled south towards Valencia.

I find myself alone in the huge courtyard. Dogs are barking at the wind. A fountain provides the only other sound. I go into a huge, triple-nave chapel. It is dark, so I wait outside. A sign hangs in the entrance. ‘The services are in Catalan. Please be punctual.’ Bells ring out – a warm, booming noise that announces vespers. I go back into the cavernous chapel, where lights are slowly being turned on. A woman is confessing in one gloomy corner. Two dozen white-robed monks file in to the stalls that occupy part of the central nave. Poblet, I am surprised to see, is as multiracial as Las Ramblas. The younger monks mostly look as if they come from south America or north Africa.

There are only three of us in the congregation: the woman who had been confessing, a young man in a puffa jacket and myself. A monk offers me a copy of the Antifonari so I can follow proceedings. ‘Where are you from?’ he asks. ‘Britain,’ I reply. ‘Better not then,’ he says, retiring the book. ‘It is in Catalan.’ I persuade him that I can follow it anyway – both the music and the words. In fact, the words turn out to be easier. The musical score is dense and mysterious. It loses me quickly. The singing is soft and harmonious. It feels as though it is issuing from the stones and the walls. The monks somehow manage to fill the three broad, high naves of the chapel with their music. Incense wafts slowly down from the far end of the chapel, which seems a very long way off. The chapel is not just cold, but damp. A deep chill creeps into my bones as I sit on my wooden pew. My hands go numb. I wrap them in a scarf. The monks keep singing, standing, sitting and bowing as they go through their rituals.

Towards the back of the chapel, beyond the monks, I can see an elaborate stone tomb. I wonder who it belongs to. This is the last resting place of many medieval Catalan rulers, counts and kings. Most have nicknames. The Chaste, the Conqueror, the Lover of Elegance, the Benign and the Humanist are all here.

When I leave, it is night time. I am alone again in the courtyard and the spotlights send huge shadows against the walls. For a moment I am a silhouette giant, as big as one of the hexagonal towers at the Royal Gate. I walk out thinking that, were I Catalan, I might feel the pull of history, some essence of my identity, in a place like this.

As I leave, I think about Catalan history and identity. So what makes a nation a nation, or a country a country? Does it have to be an independent state? Obviously not, if you think about Scotland. When can a country be said to have disappeared, or come into existence? And what does it mean to be a country – or, if you want, a nation – inside another country? Catalans account for nearly one in six Spaniards. They are an essential part of the mix. It is a very Spanish conundrum.

It is not a new one. ‘They are neither French nor Spanish but sui generis in language, costume and habits,’ the great British chronicler of early-nineteenth-century Spain, Richard Ford, reported. ‘No province of the unamalgamating bundle which forms the conventional monarchy of Spain hangs more loosely to the crown than Catalonia, this classical country of revolt, which is ever ready to fly off.’

History sometimes helps. Sometimes it does not. In Spain it is, to a great degree, something to argue over – another political weapon in the battle of identities. Catalan history is no exception. ‘History is a trap,’ the separatist writer Víctor Alexandre warned me. ‘What matters is now, and the future.’

The facts of Catalan history are fairly straightforward. Northern Catalonia had been recovered from the Moors relatively quickly, in the early eighth century. Charlemagne’s son helped take Barcelona in 801. This was the Spanish March – a series of counties that acted as a buffer zone between the Franks and the Muslims. Barcelona was ruled by counts. Wilfred the Hairy, considered by some to be the founder of Catalonia, brought Barcelona and other counties together. He was, however, still a vassal to, of all people, Charles the Bald.

Catalans liked giving their counts – as those buried at Poblet showed – nicknames. If Wilfred was Hairy – and he certainly is in later sculptures of him – his successors over the coming centuries were one of the following: Crooked, Old, Towheaded, Great, Fratricidal, Saintly, Chaste, Catholic, Liberal, Humanist, Benign, Just, Generous, Ceremonious or just plain Careless.

In 988 one of these counts, Borrell II of Barcelona, broke his vassalage to the French king Hugh Capet. It was not exactly ‘Freedom for Catalonia’, but it could be called ‘Freedom for Barcelona’. A thousand years later, in 1988, the Generalitat would decree the millennium of the political birth of Catalonia. The Counts of Barcelona expanded their territory southwards and became, through a marriage in 1137, the Kings of Aragón – a title they used from then on. The southward roll would continue until they passed Alicante in 1266. The Aragónese kings then looked east. They gained control of the Balearics (after slaughtering or selling into slavery most of the male population of Menorca), Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia and, by the fifteenth century, Naples and the southern half of modern Italy. But the lines with Castile were already getting blurred. The original dynasty ran out of heirs on the death of Martí, the Humanist, in 1410. Martí turned out to be the last Catalan to rule. A Castilian, Ferdinand of Antequera, was brought in as king. Six centuries later some Catalans would rather that had never happened.

In 1479 the new rulers would, again by marriage, help unify Spain under the joint leadership of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragón. Thirteen years later they conquered the last Spanish Muslim kingdom at Granada. Castile plus Aragón minus Moors meant, basically, that Spain had been founded (though there was still work to be done in Navarre). The rest, as they say, is history. But it is not. This is Spain. History, once more, is the stuff of debate, disagreement and politics.

The origins of Catalan discontent with the results of Isabella’s and Ferdinand’s marriage can be found, some say, in an oath. It was one sworn by subjects of the Aragonese kings and it went: ‘We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than us, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our liberties and laws – but if not, not.’

With the court now displaced from Barcelona to Castile, Catalans began to lose out. Trade to the Americas was given to Andalucía. Plague, famine and an overstretched Mediterranean empire were, anyway, taking their toll.

The Catalan national anthem, adapted from a folk song in the late nineteenth century, recalls what the Generalitat refers to as ‘the War of the Catalans against King Philip IV’ in 1640. For a while I could find no other reference to this war. Then I discovered it was usually given another name. It is the Revolt of the Reapers, or the Reapers’ War. Whatever its proper name – and the motivation – the peasant rebels were Catalans down to their canvas espardenyes, espadrilles. They invented, as a password, a tongue-twister full of sounds that only a Catalan could hope to say: ‘Setze jutges d’un jutjat menjen fetge d’un penjat’, ‘Sixteen judges from a court eat the liver of a hanged man’. It was, for your average lisping Spaniard, as confusing and impossible a phrase as the words ‘Manchester United’ are to today’s football commentators (who, for some reason, never quite make it to that final ‘d’ sound). The Catalan aristocracy joined the peasants, Catalonia saw off the king’s army and momentarily declared independence under French protection. France did not like the idea of an independent Catalonia. A week later, Catalonia swore allegiance to the king of France ‘as in the time of Charlemagne, with a contract to observe our constitutions’. Catalans stayed French subjects for twelve years. They spent much of that time falling out amongst themselves. Eventually, with the Aragónese and Valencians refusing to help them, they were reabsorbed into Spain.

The anthem is called ‘Els Segadors’, ‘The Reapers’. ‘We must not be the prey/ Of those proud and arrogant invaders!/Let us swing the sickle!/Let us swing the sickle, defenders of our land!’ it urges. The proud and arrogant (gent tan ufana i tan superba in Catalan) they rail against every time they sing their anthem are, of course, Castilians. Again, the Generalitat cannot resist offering a po-faced explanation for the anthem. ‘It is solemn and firm, and unites the will of the people in favour of the survival of a nation which proclaims its full national character.’ It is, in fact, a celebration of the last time Catalonia actually managed to break from the rest of Spain.

Then, in 1705, the Catalans made a mistake. In a tussle over who was to get the crown, they backed a loser, Archduke Charles of Austria. A ferocious siege of Barcelona ensued, ending in defeat on Catalonia’s own version of 9/11 – 11 September 1714. Modern Catalonia has taken the Dunkirk approach to remembering that event: 11 September is now the day Catalonia celebrates the Diada, its national day – a celebration of defeat. Like the anthem, it also reminds Catalans that their natural enemy is in Madrid.

The winner in 1714, Philip V, took his revenge by passing the Nueva Planta decree. Catalan was barred from schools – a measure that left the illiterate and uneducated peasantry indifferent. Castilian became the language of government and the courts. Catalonia also had some ancient institutions of its own which would now disappear. A century before England got its Magna Carta, Catalonia had already developed, in the early twelfth century, what is claimed to be Europe’s first written bill of rights – the Usatges. While this did not help the serfs, it provided a legal framework for free men to argue peacefully over their affairs.

A parliament, les Corts, had been set up with limited powers in 1283. It represented the clergy, the nobles and the wealthier merchants. Its affairs were run by a standing committee of twelve men, the Generalitat. By the late thirteenth century Barcelona, too, had a sort of parliament – known as the Consell de Cent, the council of one hundred men. The Generalitat and the city’s consell eventually conducted their business from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Gothic palaces facing one another across the cobbled Plaça de Sant Jaume. They still do. Catalonia’s modern-day politicians and administrators have no way of avoiding history. They work in the middle of it.

Corts, Consell de Cent and Generalitat were, however, all abolished by Philip V. Les Corts, anyway, had met only once since 1632.

The 1714 defeat led, in Jordi Pujol’s own words, to ‘Catalans returning to their homes and staying there, without aspiring to anything more than to survive without ambition or any collective project, for 200 years’. None of this prevented them, however, from prospering economically over the next few centuries. They exported wool and paper. In the nineteenth century the cotton trade was smaller only than that of England, France and the United States. Barcelona embraced the industrial revolution long before most of the rest of Spain.

Growing wealth allowed Barcelona to expand, giving Ildefons Cerdà a chance to design the Eixample, where I would later live through the 1992 Olympics. Cerdà was, however, more than aware of where the money was coming from. He was one of the few to warn about the vile living conditions into which factory hands were forced. Catalan peasants had held occasional revolts. Soon the urban working classes would be at it too. Church-burning was a particularly Catalan sport. In 1835 a bullfight was held in Barcelona. It was not a success. The crowd became angry. A popular rhyme in Catalan explains what happened next. ‘Hi haver una gran broma/ dintre del Torín./ Van sortir tres braus,/ tots van ser dolents:/ això fou la causa/ de cremar convents.’ ‘There was a big set-to/ inside the bull-ring./Three fighting bulls appeared/but all were weak: and that was the cause/ of the burning of the convents.’ Not for the first time, or the last, Barcelona’s skyline was streaked by plumes of smoke coming from church buildings. The Church, rich, powerful, arrogant and unpopular, had already seen its buildings burnt in Barcelona fifteen years earlier. Even Poblet, miles away in the fields of upper Tarragona, was torched. Lerroux’s young barbarians, or their anticlerical heirs, would be back with their matches the following century. Modern Catalans often proudly proclaim that bullfighting has nothing to do with them – but it has obviously been around for almost two centuries.

Catalans were, of course, not all church-burners. Antoni Gaudí, the architect of the Sagrada Familia cathedral which is still rising – its colourful, ceramic-encrusted spires already a symbol of the city – eighty years after he was run over by a tram, was a deeply conservative, religious man. One of his first projects was the restoration of Poblet, which had become a crumbling, vandalised wreck. In later life Gaudí became a pious, ascetic eccentric. He lived on the Sagrada Familia building site, sleeping on a small four-poster bed in the middle of a workshop piled high with plaster models of his ongoing designs. He became a strict vegetarian and turned into a seedy-looking, emaciated, white-bearded old man. ‘We must beg God to punish and then console us,’ he once said. ‘Everyone has to suffer.’ When he wandered in front of the number 30 tram on Barcelona’s Gran Vía, it took a while for someone to recognise him. He died a few days later. Legend has it he died in poverty. His will, however, turned up recently – showing that he still had a pretty pile in the bank.

Modernisme had emerged from the mid-nineteenth-century Renaixença, the Romantic Catalan renaissance that found its local hero in the exorcist poet Verdaguer. Literature in Catalan has had an irregular history. In the Middle Ages it produced three great writers – though none were, by today’s definition – Catalans. The Majorcan priest Ramon Llull wrote more than 250 texts of philosophy, poetry and theology – in Catalan, Latin and Arabic. He was eventually lynched to death while trying to convert Tunisia’s Muslims in the thirteenth century. A Valencian called Ausías March, wrote, amongst other things, impassioned verses to a mysterious mid-fifteenth-century married woman, his ‘llir entre cards’, or ‘lily amongst thistles’. Another Valencian, Joanot Martorell, produced a raunchy fifteenth-century novel about knights in shining armour which tossed old values of unconsummated courtly love into the literary dustbin. In his Tirant lo Blanc, considered a precursor to Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the eponymous hero’s manservant rejects a would-be lover’s offer of a few strands of hair: ‘No, my lady, no. That time is past. I know quite well what Tirant desires: to see you in bed, either naked or in your nightdress.’ It seems that Catalans, still more French than Spanish in their amorous arrangements, always were more sophisticated in sexual matters.

Catalan literature slackened until Verdaguer’s time in the mid-nineteenth century. Today’s Catalan writers can choose between two languages. One offers them a larger market. The other offers, via the Generalitat, to buy the first 300 copies of their book.

The Renaixença broke the emotional ground for the emergence of political Catalanism. Gaudí, when presented to King Alfonso XIII, addressed him in Catalan. His example could be an inspiration to the Generalitat’s latest language campaign which encourages people to start their conversations with strangers in Catalan. ‘Parla sense vergonya’, ‘Speak [Catalan] without shame’, it urges them.

Gaudí‘s most fervent admirers believe, however, he is more than just a model of virtuous Catalanism. He is, they say, also a model of saintliness. The Vatican’s Congregation for Saints’ Causes seems to agree. It is studying a petition for his beatification, which looks set to go ahead. He is already known as ‘God’s architect’. God and Catalonia – the cornerstones of traditional nationalism – meet in Gaudí.

Catalans, generally, are good at celebrating their own culture. They eagerly sign up to belong to groups and do things together. They form clubs to go rambling, to dance their peculiar sardana or to form those scary (seven-or eight-storey) human towers, the castells, that balance small children precariously on their top.

Catalan politicians, however, have sponsored some quite absurd attempts to create a distinctive Catalan culture. Pujol made this – along with language and history – one of the main battlegrounds of Catalan nationalism. The rules set for his functionaries in the Palau Moja were simple. There was money for things in Catalan. There was relatively little, or no, money for things that were not. Half the population, which naturally did things in Castilian, was out of the loop. Catalonia has some interesting theatre, but quality, critics complained, was not always a criterion when handing out funding. The policy reached its most absurd when El Tricicle, a group of comic mime artists, presented a short film for the National Film Awards of the Generalitat. They were told, however, that their wordless film did not qualify. The reason was simple. The silent movie’s title, Quien mal anda, mal acaba, was in castellano.

As culture in Catalan frequently depended on financing from the Catalan state, those on the receiving end were careful not to bite the hand that fed them. Catalan nationalism, as a subject, was, therefore, taboo. In the theatre world, there was one shining exception – Albert Boadella’s Els Joglars. Boadella was quick to turn his attention to the new holy cows of Catalonia. Nationalism had built him a whole new set. They were waiting to be knocked down like fairground coconuts. The chief holy cow was Pujol himself.

Pujol embodies the view many Catalans had fashioned of themselves after Franco’s death. He was a proven anti-Francoist – having been jailed for two years for his involvement with a group of people who stood up and sang Els Segadors at Barcelona’s magnificent modernist concert hall, El Palau de la Música Catalana. He was a Catholic conservative. He was also a banker. A man who understands money is admired in Catalonia. ‘La pela és la pela’, ‘Money is money’, is one common local saying. A Catalan-language poet, the Majorcan Anselm Turmeda, wrote an eloquent ode to cash in his fifteenth-century ‘Elogi de Diners’ (‘In Praise of Money’) which ends: ‘Diners, doncs, vulles aplegar./Si els pots haver no els lleixs anar:/si molts n’hauràs poràs tornar/ papa de Rom’, ‘So you must get money!/If you get it, don’t let it go!/If you have lots, you can become/the Pope in Rome.’ The Borgias had almost certainly read that one.

Pujol was a formidable politician. He was, in fact, too good. Over his quarter-century in charge he became Catalonia, and Catalonia became him. He was referred to simply as ‘el President’. He added a few Napoleonic touches of his own. He insisted, for example, that journalists stood for him when he arrived – usually late – for his press conferences. He sent self-interviews to Barcelona newspapers – questions and answers by Jordi Pujol. Worse still, these would be printed.

There was a rationale behind this self-grandeur. Pujol was building, or rebuilding, a nation. The nation needed national symbols. One of those symbols was el President. By this logic, Pujol turned himself into a symbol of Catalonia. ‘When seeing him in action it is impossible not to recall De Gaulle’s ‘La France, c’est moi’, the Irish–Spanish writer Ian Gibson said.

An Els Joglars show inspired by Alfred Jarry’s Ubú Roi, called President Ubú, saw Pujol and his wife pilloried mercilessly. The Pujol offered up by Boadella was, according to one critic, not just maniacally ambitious and money-grabbing but also showed ‘homicidal tendencies, a double personality and delusions of grandeur’. Boadella did not bite his tongue when explaining his vision: ‘Ubú Excels [Pujol’s alter ego] invades our privacy daily, recriminating, advising, threatening, moralising and laying down the law … explaining even how we Catalans have to urinate,’ he said. His punishment included a long-running, if undeclared, veto on Els Joglars by Catalonia’s television and its national theatre house. Culture, once more, was wielded as a political weapon. It still is, even without Pujol in power. When Catalonia was invited to exhibit at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2005, the Generalitat said it would concentrate on those who wrote in Catalan – though many of Catalonia’s best writers do not. The new regional government that made that decision is headed by a Socialist, Pasqual Maragall, who has also shown some strong catalanista tendencies – and is allied with a separatist party, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya.

There is a terrible ambiguity to Pujol and his nationalists. They proclaim Catalonia to be a nation. They want to ‘desenvolupar la plena sobirania nacional’, ‘develop full national sovereignty’. They deny, however, having separatist ambitions. But, they add, who knows what the future will bring? In practice, Pujol’s nationalists have turned to an age-old Catalan tradition – pactisme, dealmaking. Catalonia’s burgesía has been striking deals for centuries. Barcelona, after all, was a major Mediterranean trading city when Madrid was little more than a large village.

Catalan nationalism is still the strongest political force, even though a coalition of other parties currently keeps it out of power. It has always been determined to maintain its seny, to be moderate and sensible. On several occasions Pujol’s party has held the balance of power in the Madrid parliament, Las Cortes. It has never used it to destabilise or drive extravagant bargains. It has propped up both left and right. It has, however, always made sure it walked away with a bit more power. The result, as he himself admits, is that ‘not once over the past three hundred years have we, continuously, enjoyed such a degree of political power’.

Pujol’s wife, Marta Ferrusola, represents the more visceral, unpleasant side of Catalan nationalism. The former first lady of Catalonia stirred up a major controversy when she declared that immigration might lead to Catalonia’s Romanesque churches being empty within a decade. Catalonia would, instead, be full of mosques. Her husband, she insisted, was fed up with giving council housing to ‘Moroccans and people like that’. Family aid was going to people ‘who do not even know what Catalonia is’. These were people who only knew how to say ‘¡Hola!’ and ‘Give me something to eat!’ she said. ‘Whoever stays in Catalonia should speak Catalan,’ she added. Her comments coincided with the public support offered to Austria’s chief xenophobe, Jörg Haider, by Heribert Barrera. Barrera was a head of the separatist, and supposedly leftwing, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya. He had also been a president, or speaker, of the Catalan parliament. ‘If the current flow of immigrants continues, Catalonia will disappear,’ he claimed. ‘When Haider says there are too many foreigners in Austria he is not being racist.’

These outbursts were worrying. As a young man Pujol had been damning about xarnegos, describing the typical immigrant from Andalucía or Murcia as ‘a destroyed and anarchic man’ who ‘if their numbers come to dominate, will destroy Catalonia’. He long ago repented of that attitude, however, saying Catalonia should be ‘just, respectful, non-discriminatory and in favour of all that can help the immigrants’. That was his public stance anyway. He must have told his wife something different. In any case, the feeling persists amongst non-Catalan speakers that they are looked down upon. The message they perceive is this: Good Catalans speak Catalan. Bad ones do not.

Catalanism is a car with no reverse gear. It may go slow, it may go fast, but it only goes in one direction. At what stage, I wondered, would nationalists say: ‘That’s enough. We have achieved our aims. We don’t want any more power here. You can keep what is left in Madrid’? The answer to that question is almost certainly ‘never’. A nationalist needs, by definition, to keep demanding more – and to claim always that they are the victim of injustice.

I can understand separatism. It is a straightforward and honest credo. The ambiguity of Catalan nationalists, however, makes it impossible to guess where they want to go. It also ensures that the tension between Madrid and Catalonia can never be resolved. It might vary in degree, but it will be eternal. The nationalist definition of Catalonia seems to require it.

Jordi Pujol finally retired as president in 2003, though he still looms large, presiding over the Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya party. His successor, Artur Mas, won most seats in the elections that year. But he did not win an absolute majority. Mas was outflanked by Pasqual Maragall, the same Socialist who, as mayor, had seen Barcelona so brilliantly through the Olympics. He stitched together what, on the surface, was an unlikely coalition of left-wing parties. It included Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya – the separatist party which had doubled its support to take one in six Catalan votes.

The best explanation of the growth in separatism has been provided by Ricardo, a cartoonist at El Mundo newspaper. He drew a cartoon of Aznar, the belligerently centralist Conservative prime minister at the time, rubbing a lamp. A genie came out and offered him a wish. ‘I want you to make all those who radicalise the nationalists disappear,’ he said. The genie responded by turning Aznar to dust.

Maragall, however, not only needs the support of separatists to run the Generalitat but also has some nationalist tendencies of his own. His grandfather, Joan Maragall, was a major Catalan poet and admirer of Verdaguer. He penned a famous ode to Spain, which chided it for ignoring Catalonia after the disastrous losses of Cuba and the Philippines in 1898.

Joan Maragall’s poem reflected, amongst other things, Catalonia’s pain at losing its valuable markets in Cuba. The relationship with Cuba had been strong. Catalans still sing havaneres – Cuban songs brought back by its sailors. Bacardi – the world’s most famous rum – owes its name to its Catalan founders. The disaster of 1898 marked a moment when Catalonia’s upper middle class lost faith in Spain and turned towards regional nationalism as an alternative. If Madrid could not run their affairs properly – or guarantee their markets – they would run them themselves.

Under the poet’s grandson there will be no turning the clock back on education and language reforms. A Pujol law imposing fines on shopkeepers who fail to translate their signs into Catalan is still there, as are the offices where people can denounce those who do not comply. Maragall, meanwhile, is demanding a reform of Catalonia’s statute that will see it accrue further powers. He wants it formally recognized as ‘a nation’ – a concept that drives Spain’s traditional right apoplectic.

A Catalan journalist explained the progress of catalanismo like this: ‘The train is going down the track. All the major parties in Catalonia except the People’s Party [which gets only one in eight votes] want it to keep moving. The only argument is where it should stop. The Catalan socialists will get off at federalism. Separatists want it to reach the end of the track. Nobody knows where the nationalists will stop.’ He might have added that the latter were, however, determined to make sure the train never ran out of coal.

Maragall’s reforms are set to happen despite the opposition of leading Socialists in other parts of Spain. Such views can coexist in the Spanish Socialist Party because it is federal. What is strange about the Socialist Party, which currently governs Spain under Zapatero, is that it does not formally propose the same solution for Spain itself. ‘Federal’ is a word it has begun to toy with. It is not ready, however, to go the whole way. Some argue that, with so much devolution of central power, Spain is already a long way down the federal track. A formally federal Spain remains the ideal, only, of the far left and the Socialists in Catalonia – even though it seems an obvious solution to what Spaniards call ‘el problema territorial’.

The political father of Catalan nationalism, Enric Prat de la Riba, reached a similar conclusion in 1906. ‘Catalonia is a nation … a collective spirit, a Catalan soul, which was able to create a Catalan language, Catalan law and Catalan art.’ How to square the principles of ‘to each nation, a state’ and ‘the political unity of Spain’? Prat de la Riba’s solution was ‘l’Estat compost’ – basically a federation. In 1914 Catalonia got something much less than that – an administrative body called the Mancomunitat. It was shortlived. In 1925 the dictator General Miguel Primo de Rivera dissolved it. Primo de Rivera would, amongst other absurdities, ban the Sardana – the painfully earnest and unexciting Catalan group folk dance. The striking down of cultural symbols, however minor, was part of yet another determined re-engineering of the Catalans.

As would happen with Franco and, to a lesser but demonstrable degree, with Aznar, a militant centralist in Madrid only served to popularise Catalan nationalism. After Primo de Rivera had gone it came back with a vengeance. This time, however, it was driven by the left. In 1931, a leader of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, Lluís Companys, proclaimed the Catalan Republic to a crowd in Barcelona. The then head of the ERC, Fransesc Macià, claimed this new republic was part of ‘the Federation of Iberian Republics.’ Federal Spain poked its nose above the parapet. It was, as in 1640, a short-lived idea. Three days later Macià backtracked and agreed to the idea of a semi-autonomous government to be called, once more, the Generalitat. It would last until the Spanish Civil War, with Companys as its last president. Companys was forced into exile. Extradited from occupied France by Hitler while Franco’s brother-in-law, the Cuñadísimo Serrano Suñer was foreign minister, he would be shot on a hill above Barcelona in 1940. Companys’ party would later be led, for a while, by that future Haider-lover Heribert Barrera. The current generation of leaders have distanced themselves, and their party, from his racist discourse.

Thinking of Barrera, I travelled to the town of Vic. This is the heartland of traditional Catalonia. Hairy Wilfred had begun its ninth-century rebuilding after it was recovered from the Moors. Verdaguer was born nearby. Here I found a group of ‘language volunteers’ giving free lessons to immigrants. They were making a heartfelt effort to help these people integrate in Catalonia. I wondered, however, what really motivated them. Were they zealous missionaries of Catalan, converting natives? Or were they genuinely welcoming, just trying to help them out? When I heard one enthusiastically explain to a classroom of Africans what the idiom ‘treballar com un negre’ – ‘to work like a black man’ – meant, I wondered even harder. She did not notice the sharp intake of breath from some of those – hard-working, lowly-paid and black – in the room.

Moving back to the Ramblas, I found another group of immigrants studying Catalan. They were here for money, not love. ‘I went for a job and they said come back when you can speak Catalan,’ explained one Ecuadorian. She complained that, in the city’s hospitals, nurses and doctors often addressed her in Catalan. In fact, with Catalan required for many public-sector and some private-sector jobs, speakers are now up to 5 per cent more likely to find employment. People from abroad, or elsewhere in Spain, shout ‘Discrimination’. My Catalan friends – some of whom now work and live almost exclusively in Catalan – find that hard to accept.

I would like to move back to Barcelona one day. This has always been where I have felt most at ease in Spain. My conscience, however, tells me that, if I do so, I should learn Catalan. I am, after all, no longer the innocent foreigner who stepped off a plane at Barcelona airport in the mid-1980s with a rucksack, little idea of Spain and – like those immigrants Mrs Pujol complains about – none at all of Catalonia.

But I can think of many other, more useful, languages I would rather learn first – Arabic, Chinese, perhaps Italian. It makes a move to Barcelona about as attractive – and likely – as going to, say, Helsinki or Athens. Does that mean I am being excluded? Or am I excluding myself? Perhaps I just take it all too seriously. Pujol recently complained that Catalonia felt ‘uncomfortable’ in Spain. Maybe I should go to Barcelona and allow myself to feel ‘uncomfortable’ too.

As my quest for Catalonia’s ‘differentiating fact’ drew to a close, I set off to visit the least popular museum in Barcelona. It is dedicated to none other than that great and beloved poet Verdaguer. I drove up a twisting road past the funfair at Tibidabo – the highest point in the hills that rear up above the city. This peak’s name comes from the words of the Devil’s offer when he tempted Christ. Would he have had the will-power, I wondered, to reply ‘get thee behind me Satan’ had he been offered Barcelona?

I drove through dense woodland. Here, a stone’s throw from the city, a shepherd was tending his sheep. A sign pointed me towards a converted masía, an eighteenth-century Catalan farm house, called Villa Joana. This is where Verdaguer, disgraced and distraught, died in 1902. ‘I am in a sea of troubles that do not let me think or write, let alone sing,’ he complained. A few years earlier he had been banned from saying Mass. Although he was reinstated, the elite of Barcelona – his former patrons – had mostly turned their backs on him.

It was a Saturday morning. I was the only visitor at the museum, silently trailed by a uniformed security guard. There was obviously no taboo, or at least not any more, on mentioning his supposed madness. His exorcism writings, I found, had now been published. The museum explains how Verdaguer became the leading light in the Renaixença and the star turn at its annual poetry competition, the Jocs Florals. The Renaixença had included, in 1841, the publication, in the preface of a poetry anthology, of a call for cultural independence by Joaquim Rubió i Ors which claimed that Spain was no longer ‘the fatherland’ of Catalans.

The clarion call came from a man who, like many of the Renaixença figures, were from Catalonia’s prosperous upper middle class of merchants and financiers. Bonaventura Carles Aribau eventually spent much of his time in Madrid, running Spain’s treasury, mint and state holdings. That did not stop him waxing lyrical in La Pàtria (The Fatherland) about his roots and his language, which he referred to by the medieval term of llemosí. ‘En llemosí soná lo meu primer vagit,/ Quant del mugró matern la dolça llet bebia/ En llemosí al Senyor pregaba cada dia,/ E cántichs llemosins somiaba cada nit.’ (‘My first infant wail was in Catalan/ when I sucked sweet milk from my mother’s nipple./ I prayed to God in Catalan each day/and dreamed Catalan songs every night.’)

The Renaixença gave birth to political catalanismo. In Catalonia, the poets came first, then the politicians. That explains why language and culture – and not the bullet or the bomb – are the chosen weapons of catalanismo. It also explains why some Catalans can be so touchy about Verdaguer.

My search for the hecho diferencial ends here. Catalans are obviously different. But I do not see that this conflicts with being Spanish. In any case, it strikes me as something an outsider cannot judge. The hecho diferencial can only be felt from within. If a Catalan feels that he or she is Catalan above all else, and that this makes them different to other Spaniards – or, even, not a Spaniard – it is a wholly subjective sensation. Perhaps, like Aribau, one must first dream and suck a maternal nipple in Catalan. The outsider cannot share it. Nor, I am sure, can the immigrants on Las Ramblas.

Catalans are not, however, the only Spaniards whose first dreams normally come in a language other than Catalan. The Basques, as we have seen, cannot compete. Euskara is still far from being their first language. The people of Galicia, however, do mostly speak their own language, galego. They, too, have their own poets. So how do they fit into the jigsaw puzzle that is Spain? To find that out, I would have to leave the warm and placid Mediterranean behind me. I would need to head for the wild, wet Atlantic, to a place that is home to The End of the World.