Barcelona: waterfront and surfers

Barcelona has an enviable seafront: I walked to the end of Carrer de la Marina, where the road ends right next to the Olympic port, on a wide pier that might once have been a ferry dock.

Then I turned right and started following the sea: on the left the beach, on the right a series of buildings, almost all contemporary, at one point even a hospital. The beach is wide, as I don't expect a beach to be in front of the city: they usually end up squashed, gnawed, reduced to the bare minimum.

I kept walking in a landscape that, from the city side, is constantly changing. I walked all the way into La Barceloneta, a town inside the city, made up of small, regular streets, very close together: it was built to accommodate the people who, in the early 1700s, had lost their houses because they had been demolished to make room for the nearby citadel.

More or less halfway along I meet this group of quiet surfers: they were just standing there, as if waiting for a wave that nobody but them suspected existed.