Every year, like clockwork, the collective ritual of complaining about summer appears. Too many tourists, too much heat, too much noise, too much of everything. And yet, every year, we return. To the same cove, to the same beach bar, to the same village in the Garrotxa where grandad had a house that is now owned by an investment fund.
Summer in Catalunya has something that resists rationality. It’s not just the weather, although the weather helps. It’s a way of stopping time that, in a country that has been running towards somewhere for decades without ever arriving, has a value that isn’t traded on the stock market but is felt in our bodies.
We tend to remember childhood summers as something that no longer exists. The endless afternoons on the beach, the smell of sunscreen and salt, the ice creams that melted before reaching our mouths. All of that was real, of course. But we were also children, and children have a relationship with time that adults have lost without even realising it.
Summer hasn’t worsened. We have changed.
What has changed, and nostalgia doesn’t apply here, is the territory. The Costa Brava of the 1970s and that of today are two different places that share geographical coordinates. The inland villages that once survived with four families and a major festival now fill with people in August and empty in September with a violence that breaks the soul. The Delta de l’Ebre resists as best it can. The Pyrenees have been negotiating between artificial snow and authenticity for decades.
This is not inevitable. It is the result of specific decisions made by specific people over decades. And it can be done differently.
Summer in Catalunya is, among other things, a mirror. It clearly shows what the rest of the year hides beneath layers of routine and normality.
It shows that Barcelona pushes its neighbours to the periphery while filling the central flats with tourists who pay for an experience that the locals can no longer afford. It shows that there are two Catalunyas: the one that appears in Instagram photos and the one that lives from season to season without a safety net. It shows that the language, in summer, retreats with a ease that discourages even the most optimistic.
But it also shows other things. That people here know how to live when they allow themselves to. That an afternoon in Barceloneta, with all its chaos and noise, remains one of the most democratic urban experiences in Europe. That summer markets, street parties, early chestnut festivals, and village major festivals are a form of social cohesion that doesn’t need subsidies or communication campaigns to function.
We are not going to resolve the debate about tourism here. Those who charge for trying have been unable to resolve it for years.
What is worth mentioning is that mass tourism and territorial identity are hardly compatible in the long term. Not because tourists are bad, which they generally are not. But because the logic of volume destroys everything that made a place worth visiting in the first place. It is a well-known and, apparently, irresistible paradox.
Catalunya has enough territory, enough culture, and enough collective common sense to do things differently. The problem is that doing things differently requires giving up short-term income. And that, politically, costs what it costs.
Despite everything, summer in Catalunya works. People go to the sea. They climb the mountains. They visit museums that they ignore the rest of the year. They eat well, sleep poorly, and return home with the feeling, not always rational, of having regained something.
Perhaps summer is not so much a season as it is a decision. The decision to stop, even for a moment, and look around. To remember that living in a place with sea, mountains, good food, and four thousand years of history is not something to be taken for granted.
There are entire countries that would give what they do not have to have what is managed here with such ambivalence.
Summer in Catalunya is no longer what it used to be. It never was exactly. But it remains, with all its flaws, one of the best reasons to stay.
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