Barcelona tours - Mad Lord Peterborough takes Barcelona

Barcelona, 1705. The War of the Spanish Succession is in full swing, and Lord Peterborough sits in his tent fearing he will never take the city by conventional means.

So, without consulting his cautious multinational staff, he decides to pull an old Grecian trick on the Bourbon Viceroy. With 1,400 men he embarks and sails off. Then, as dusk falls, he doubles back and, early in the morning, lands behind Barcelona's impregnable mountain fortress of Montjuïc. Guided by a shepherd his troops assault the castle and a fortuitous grenade in the powder magazine ends the drowsy resistance.

Then, says Voltaire, instead of settling down for a victory lunch, Peterborough continues down the hill to Barcelona, which surrenders too.

But you betrayed us, cries the Viceroy: your (German) allies are in the city, pillaging and killing.

Peterborough enters on his horse, stops the havoc, and then to cap it all rescues a succulent damsel from some brutal Catalans and ... restores her to her husband. Ah, sighed the populace, those gallant Brits!

Well, for a couple of days at least.

Peterborough's probable route is now mainly quarry, but our route evokes something of the atmosphere of that day. We start at the site of the first Roman port: several kilometres south of the current city, river silt caused its gradual abandonment, but a castle remained here until the Middle Ages. The river delta provided rich farmland, and mass settlement only came in the 20th century, when hungry workers from other parts of Spain built shanty towns and cave dwellings on the slopes of the mountain and employers built factories on the plain. Now gypsies (including Barcelona's most notorious southern Slav clan) with pigfoot charms rub shoulders with memories of dictator Franco's Catalan nationalist (!) aviator brother.

Next stop is Barcelona's great South-West Cemetery, which opened in 1883 on a site overlooking the Mediterranean where a 1091 document mentions "old Jewish sepulchres". Like its predecessor in Poblenou, it was a secular, municipal project whose purpose was to prevent the dead from infecting the living. Poblenou, however, reflects Enlightenment ideals--equality, uniformity, rationality--while on Montjuïc the great marble temples and avenues of dead industrial and colonial bourgeois and the warren of multi-storey niches for the poor mirror the industrial metropolis of the living.

We'll visit the tombs of libertarians Francisco Ascaso, Buenaventura Durruti and Francesc Ferrer i Guardia; mass graves of paupers, Civil War victims, and at least one more "martyr"; and then the resting places of various luminaries, along with some marvellous gypsy pantheons and the odd moment of madness.

Up then onto the mountain, the metre, and Peterborough's castle, with splendid views over the modern port and the rest of Barcelona.