Life & Style

The 22nd session of the Conference of the Parties (COP22) on climate change is being held in Marrakech, Morocco, since the 7^th of November and will last until the 18^th. Although only UN member states can vote at the meeting, regional and local entities can participate. A Catalan delegation has travelled to the conference in the Moroccan city, and the Catalan Minister for Planning and Sustainability, Josep Rull, will do so next weekend. The aim of the mission is to demonstrate Catalonia’s commitment to reduce its carbon footprint. “Catalonia wants to lead the fight against climate change, we are doing things reasonably well and we want to be the benchmark in Europe”, Rull stated. Catalonia ratified the Paris agreement last April and the Catalan Parliament currently has as pending the approval of a law to combat global warming. 

From the 20th to the 27th of October Cambridge will host the 36th edition of its well-known film festival and Catalan cinema will again have its own place in the programme. For the fifth time the event features ‘Camera Catalonia’, the most important fair in the UK focused on Catalan film. This year’s edition includes two of the most successful box office comedies in recent years: ‘Barcelona Summer Night’ and the sequel ‘Barcelona Christmas Night’, by young director Dani de la Orden. There are two other premieres, the documentary about Xavier Cugat, a Catalan musician during the golden years of Hollywood who became one of the originators of the Latin sound, ‘Sex, Maracas & Chihuahuas’and ‘The Virus of Fear’ by renowned Catalan film director Ventura Pons.“Everybody appreciates that cinema is one of best presentation letters to the world and that it is a perfect way of making us known to the world”, ‘Camera Catalonia’s curator, Ramon Lamarca, told the CNA.

On a day like today, 30 years ago, Barcelona achieved its long-time dream to become the venue for the Olympic Games. It was 1.30 pm on Friday the 17^th of October 1986 when the President of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, announced that Barcelona had just won the nomination to host the major sports event in 1992. The proclamation was followed by an outburst of joy in Catalonia and also in the Palais de Beaulie of Lausanne, the venue of the IOC session. Barcelona won the race over five other cities, Paris, Brisbane (Australia), Belgrade, Amsterdam and Birmingham, and by doing so it gained a place on the world map, undertook a major urban transformation and breathed into its citizens a feeling of great pride in their city.  

The Sagrada Família is one of the most emblematic, but also one of the most polemic, buildings in Barcelona. With up to 10,000 visitors per day, more than 3 million every year, the most iconic building by Antoni Gaudí is a nightmare for neighbours, who have to deal with congestion in their streets and are afraid that the temple construction works may be expanded beyond the current enclosure. Recently, though, a new controversy has also arisen. After more than a century under construction, Barcelona City Hall has announced that it will request the basilica board to pay taxes and have a building permit, which it does not currently possess. According to the estimations, this licence will demand €840,000 of the Barcelona Archbishop, €8.4 million by 2026, the year in which the works are supposed to be completed.

Barcelona Games World has kicked off this Thursday at the Montjuic Exhibition Centre in the Catalan Capital. In its first edition in Barcelona, after the organisers decided to move it from Madrid, the fair expects to surpass the 90,000 visitors that attended Madrid Games Week last year. The event, which will last until the 9^th of October, will count on the participation of 155 exhibitors setting up showcases by brands such as Electronic Arts, Nintendo and Badland Games. The fair will serve as a connecting point between businesses, facilitating the market for professionals who work in the field, but there will also be room for amateur and professional video games competitions and conferences by key gurus of the video game industry. 

I Love Tour, the company behind the five-day event for students from the United Kingdom ‘Saloufest’ has decided to cancel the festival. After 16 years celebrating this festival in the town of Salou, on Catalonia's Costa Daurada, the organisers have considered that the Catalan Government and the Salou’s Town Hall “pressure” make it “nearly impossible to offer programmes for youth tourism in the region”. As an alternative, the promotors offer to the 10,000 students which were due to attend ‘Saloufest’ to go to ‘Sportsvest’ instead, an event to be organised in Lloret de Mar, on the Costa Brava. ‘Saloufest’ combines sports with leisure activities but in recent years many neighbours and entities in the area have complained about several out-of-control parties, which saw loud singing and drunken behaviour on the streets of the town. 

Barcelona’s battle against illegal apartment rentals has recently taken a new turn.The European Holiday Home Association (EHHA) filed last Thursday a formal complaint with the European Commission against the “restrictions” on the renting of apartments for tourists in Barcelona. The city launchedlast July an action plan against illegal tourist accommodations. Residents consider them to be the main cause for the presence of tourists in quiet neighbourhoods and the disruption of neighbours’ tranquillity. Up to 30 million people visit Barcelona each year. Although tourism represents a significant revenue stream, the increasing number of reported incidents of noise, public urination and nudity in some spots is too much to handle. Barcelona’s action plan aims at detecting illegal sublets as well as denouncing platforms such as Airbnb and HomeAway for offering them on their platforms. The City Council has threatened to fine the websites €600,000 each, despite Airbnb contributing €740 million to Barcelona´s revenue in 2015. 

Catalonia is a land of wine and cava, therefore Catalan wineries want to expand their market beyond the Catalan borders. This week the 6th International Wine Business Meeting is taking place in Lleida, in eastern Catalonia. In this edition the guest country is Russia. The aim of this event is to promote Catalan exports and find new trade opportunities. Up to 20 Catalan wineries are participating at the meeting and considering whether to increase or open their exports to Russia. For their part, a dozen of the major wine and cava importers in Russia are attending the meeting with the aim of for new trading partners, which offer quality but which also make products that the average Russian consumer can afford.

The Catalan capital’s action plan against illegal accommodation for tourists resulted in July in the closure of 256 apartments whose activity has been considered illegal, a figure which has to be added to the 112 orders announced in the first half of 2016. Besides ordering the ceasing of their activity, the accommodation websites responsible for the flats, Airbnb and Homeaway, will have to face a 30,000 euros fine for not having the required licence. This has been possible mainly due to the task of the so-called ‘flat scouts’, a figure recently created by Barcelona’s city hall, who have found 234 illegal accommodations, while the official inspectors in charge of this only detected 22. “This is not a summer campaign but an action plan which has come to stay” warned Barcelona’s deputy mayor for Ecology, Urbanism and Mobility, Janet Sanz and emphasised that tourism in Barcelona “is not related to seasons”. 

Isla Fantasia waterpark, located 30 kilometres north of Barcelona, hosted this Tuesday the 'Water Park Day', the main highlight of Circuit Festival 2016, the world’s largest LGBTI party. Around 8,000 people from all over the world, mainly gay males between 25 and 40 years old, enjoyed the sun, the water facilities and live sessions from nine different DJs, in what is considered to be the biggest open-air gay party in Europe. Circuit Festival kicked off in Barcelona on the 2^nd of August and will feature a wide range of parties, concerts, sports events and other leisure activities for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual people until the 14^th of August. Last year around 72,000 people attended the Circuit, 80% of them foreigners. 

The Catalan capital underwent a major transformation concerning the infrastructure and urban planning during the nineties, mainly due to the celebration of the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 1992. However, rather than stopping there, Barcelona continued to adapt the city to its disabled visitors and is now considered one of the most accessible tourist destinations in Europe. Various travel agencies in the Catalan capital specialise in providing information for people with a disability. To achieve this, they offer the best accessible hotels, activities and adapted transport. Moreover, the public transport network is fully accessible and several beaches, one of the main attractions in Barcelona, also offer assisted bathing services for disabled people who cannot access the water independently.   

More and more people in Catalonia are turning to ecologically friendly food. According to the Perception and Consumption of Organic Food barometer, half of all Catalans consumed ecologically friendly food during 2015. On the way towards an ecologically and environmentally friendly city, Barcelona City Hall is promoting some initiatives to make Barcelona a more ecological city in many facets like health, sustainability, trade and social welfare. Green Markets are integrated into the new municipal policies. The aim is to promote small- and medium-sized local and ecologically friendly Catalan producers within a maximum radius of 150 km around Barcelona. The intention of the City Hall is to spread the campaign to six markets this year and, bit by bit, to transform the whole network of markets in Barcelona into an example of respect for the environment. 

A common sight at Catalan festivals, ‘castells’ can be up to 10 human storeys high, with a small child usually being placed on the top. Teams compete to create the most elaborate construction, in a tradition which is believed to date back to the 18^th Century. It is one of Catalonia's more unusual spectacles and since being declared a UNESCO element of Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2010, interest in ‘castells’ has grown beyond Catalonia. Many ‘castellers’ groups have performed abroad in cities such as Shanghai, New York, Montreal, London and many others and new groups are even emerging outside of Catalonia. While most observe this tradition from the outside, we got up close to take a peek at the inside.

The Barcelona Games World video game fair, to be held from the 6^th to the 9^th of October, has released more information about its upcoming event in 2016. Previously held in Madrid, the event will now also focus on mobile games, to “open (the fair) to other forms of interactive digital entertainment”, according to Josep Antoni Llopart, director of the fair. This decision was made in part thanks to Barcelona’s “bond” with the Mobile World Congress event. Still, the gamer will continue to be “the centre of the experience”, with over 90,000 expected to attend, competitions and prizes of up to €15,000, and the giants of the sector present (such as Nintendo, Sony, etc.). What’s more, another novelty is that the fair will be used to connect businesses, offer jobs, and help people who would like to do studies in the field of gaming. Lastly, there will be a ‘space for socialisation’ on the fairground, complete with lectures, concerts, music sessions with DJs, fashion shows and competitions.

Sónar 2016 closed its doors on its 23^rd edition with 115,500 visitors from a hundred countries. This figure is slightly lower than 2015, but maintains the last five-year average. This year, the voices of artists that had highly critical content had special relevance, noted the organisers of the festival. The co-director of the festival, Ricard Robles, said that foreign nationals who attended were mostly British, then French, German, and Italian, with an increased presence of Americans. Co-director Ventura Barba spoke positively about the sister event to the music festival that ran parallel to it, Sónar+D, which saw the participation of more than 4,500 music professionals. The novelties for Sónar 2017 have been announced, and they include two new cities added to the international route: Istanbul and Hong Kong.