A tour of the ghostly and demonic Barcelona by Ricard Martin
The Devil's Footprint
Borders are never boring; even if they are neighborhood borders: take, for example, Córcega street. Its stretch between Paseo de Gracia and Paseo de San Juan - the border between Gracia and Eixample - is a festival of human color and bustle: bingos, sex-shops, the Imperator nightclub, the Seventy Hotel, the Trébol Churrería. But remember that we are on a border: a left turn onto Milà i Fontanals, and just two hundred meters to the north to enter a dimension of total calm, in the heart of Gypsy Gracia. At Josep Torres, 20, the silence becomes almost oppressive. And almost suddenly you are assaulted by the presence of the imposing Casa Agustí Atzeries, also known as the House of the Demon. It's not hard to deduce why: four impressive frescoes of the devil incarnated as Faust's Mephistopheles adorn its facade. The image of the dandy Satan is punctuated by fierce stone heads, crouching under balconies and capitals. In 1892, the successful businessman Agustí Atzeries undertook an ambitious renovation of his home. The bankruptcy of his business put him between a rock and a hard place, and under the burden of debts and a half-finished roof, he sold his soul to the Devil. The result was a first prize in the lottery and the cleaning up of his finances in one fell swoop. It is good to be grateful: Atzeries made it very clear in the renovation who had been his sponsor. Curiously: 50 meters away, at number eight on Fraternitat, a plaque reminds us that there was born Pescaílla (who, like bluesman Robert Johnson at the crossroads, perhaps sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his prodigious fan).
A poltergeist in Gracia
The quietness of these streets hides stories that are not just legends and gossip: at number 53 Francisco Giner Street we find the trace of the only documented poltergeist in Barcelona. On Sunday, February 10, 1935, the night watchman Enric Montroig came home after a workday on Paseo de San Juan. Around 11 at night, some knocks woke up the family (two children, wife, and mother-in-law). Astonished, Montroig saw a drawer shoot out from the dining room dresser, and the knocks and nighttime noises continued to increase. On Monday, a pair of Urban Guard officers came to investigate the events, with no results. Tuesday seemed calm: but around seven-thirty in the evening, a loud noise sent all the building's neighbors into the street, terrified by an inexplicable phenomenon: chairs falling by themselves, clocks stopping, door knocks without a hand on the knob, a hail of stones in the inner courtyard, and all the windows vibrating without apparent cause. The children of the neighbors—not just the Montroig family—claimed to have seen white shadows moving through the hallway and to have felt the touch of a kind of cold wing on their forehead, while someone or something was knocking on the windows. The Montroigs vacated the property and that was the end of the Gracia poltergeist.
Father Cinto, exorcist
It's been about 25 years since I had my first alcoholic drink in Barcelona. Since then, I've heard the neighbors in El Born complain about the nuisances of tourism. Yet the inconveniences of living next to a disco-pub are nothing compared to those of living next to a house of exorcisms. Place your feet in front of the "number 7 on Mirallers street": on the fourth floor, Mossèn Cinto Verdaguer performed the sacrament of exorcism, in the late 19th century. How did the confessor of the Marquis of Comillas and one of the most popular poets in the history of Catalonia end up in such a situation? A trip to the Holy Land worsened a crisis of faith. And upon returning to Barcelona, he came into contact with the hallucinated Joaquim Pinyol, a Carmelite mystic who had established an exorcism flat in El Born, "the House of Prayer", where he and his followers devoted themselves to the arduous task of expelling the Adversary: a task to which Verdaguer dedicated himself wholeheartedly. Beneath this vocation was a social subtext: the House of Exorcisms served the most miserable echelon of Barcelona's society, besieged by the (new) false creeds of socialism, anarchism, and spiritualism. Verdaguer's joke came to an end when the bishopric, informed by the Marquise of Comillas, found out he was exorcising without a license, and banished him for a couple of years to a remote sanctuary north of Vic. Be that as it may, Mirallers is one of those gloomy spots in Barcelona where the sun never shines. Next door, alchemical miracles are now performed that, had Torquemada seen them, would go straight to an auto-da-fé: have a good drink at the "Dr. Stravinsky" (Mirallers, 5), a brilliant bar where the miracle of turning a young whiskey into an aged one in your glass is possible.
Condemned to eternity
And when we talk about acts of faith, it's necessary to remember that we are just around the corner from Bòria Street. This street is remembered in Barcelona for giving its name to the sinister route of punishment and humiliation that a condemned prisoner would suffer until their death. When someone was taken "Bòria avall", it meant that the executioner would stop at each point to lash the prisoner (who in some cases was mutilated) until the point of execution. Displaying them on top of a donkey and dressed with the sanbenito was part of the amusement in which the mob took delight as they jeered.
And it may seem obvious, but the Gothic Quarter is as much a theme park as it is a cemetery, of course. The clearest example is the beautiful Plaza de Sant Felip Neri: today it is a bucolic haven of peace. Especially because the space functions as a courtyard for a private school, and for much of the day it is closed. Tourists watch from behind fences as children play, just inches from their camera flashes. It wasn't always like this: it was first a Jewish cemetery (located in the central part of the old Jewish quarter of Barcelona). Later it became a graveyard for the various parishes of the city center, where the bodies of the executed would end up (it's no wonder that on All Souls' Day, not a living soul would venture into the square: it was rumored that at midnight a procession of the dead would cross the stone walls of the church and roam through the city; the unfortunate who crossed their path would be doomed to wander with the specters for all eternity. The reality is just as grim: on January 30, 1938, a fascist bombing killed 42 children who had sought shelter under the church. The traces of the murderous shrapnel are clearly visible on the church walls.
