Love and pain for Barcelona

The news of maestro Lluís Permanyer's death is one of those unexpected news that is even harder to accept. An untimely fall had caused an arm injury that forced him to go to rehabilitation a couple of times a week. However, this inconvenience hadn't diminished one bit his capacity for work, for analyzing the reality of that Barcelona he loved so much and which, at the same time, pained him so much when, on his endless walks through the city, his sharp eye detected the thousand and one things that aren't working there, those details that go unnoticed by the vast majority of passersby.

How many times have your comments served to prompt the municipal authority to rectify, to correct the mess that has been perpetrated, from an attack on architectural heritage to malpractice by the administration and its citizens, to errors in the urban planning of a street?

His writings were a true reflection of the elegance that Lluís treasured in all facets of life.

Every Tuesday, punctually, Lluís sent the current affairs article to the Living section ( Barcelona Notebook ) that complemented his Thursday Album , a weekly piece of compulsory reading for all those who enjoy knowing the small print of Barcelona's history and suffer, as he did, from the ravages caused by incivility, tourist and commercial monoculture and, ultimately, from the loss of identity and self-esteem of a city that all too often does not know how to make itself respected.

Lluís Permanyer's writings were a delicacy for the most discerning reader. There was never a word missing or superfluous in them. They were a true reflection of the author: his elegance in all facets of life, his vast culture, and a natural charm that all of us who have had the good fortune to know him can attest to. These articles, an extensive and varied bibliography, and his television contributions—his reports for Televisió de Catalunya on Ildefons Cerdà, Passeig de Gràcia, and Montjuïc mountain are authentic oases of rigor and wisdom in a desert of mediocrity—make up the rich cultural and civic legacy of an unrepeatable journalist.

No one could dispute Lluís Permanyer's status as a great chronicler of Barcelona over the last half-century, a distinction that this man from the Eixample (“the one-handed man from the Eixample,” as he called himself lately with that good humor that always infected others), refused to accept despite repeated proposals from various mayors of the city to formalize the recognition.

Lluís Permanyer will surely be the subject of well-deserved posthumous tributes from now on, and after he leaves this world, he will be awarded new distinctions—I know the Gold Medal of the City is already on the way—to add to the many he received throughout his professional career. But his colleagues will remember above all the celebration we held in his honor soon to be a year ago at the restored Cafè del Centre on Carrer Girona. A heartfelt tribute in his lifetime to someone who most deserved it.