In the Capital of Cool

It’s always difficult visiting a place that’s highly recommended. I know, I know. Barcelona is currently the capital of cool. But frankly, it’s not doing much for me.
For a start, most of it is brand new. Trendy architecture – rusting metal sculpture all over the place – it looks like Birmingham or Milton Keynes. And Gaudi’s famous ‘Temple de la Sagrada Familia’ always looks like something out of a Disney cartoon – all those funny little turrets with curly bits and knobs on, in a sickly brown, diarrhoea colour.

The taxi drivers set whole new standards of rudeness and incompetence, making our London black-cab drivers seem like veritable geniuses. They all seem reluctant to pick anyone up, and then have absolutely no idea of where anywhere is. The IUCN meeting I’m (reluctantly) here for meets in the World International Congress Centre – covers about ten square miles – but have the taxi drivers ever heard of it? In six trips, we’ve gone a different way each time – usually with the driver having to shout across to a pal, or squint at the map I handily produce. You must remember the Fawlty Towers line ‘I must apologise for him – he’s from Barcelona’.

They organised a visit to the zoo before I arrived – apparently there are some good rare species breeding programmes in progress – but sadly, it was at night, and the lights weren’t working. So the learned visitors did the tour in pitch darkness, slightly spoiling the effect.

But what a meeting. Eight thousand visitors and delegates here for a ten-day ego trip and jolly. Hundreds of resolutions are discussed and decided as they were at the previous meeting in Thailand four years ago (I couldn’t afford to go), and Jordan four years before that. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think very much has been achieved in that time – orang-utans are still having their habitat destroyed, tigers are still being poached, Amazon rain-forest still being cut down.

For example, one little effort. Apparently, in Chile, they’re building a cellulose factory on a lake, which happens to be a (highly protected) RAMSAR site. Everybody got into a major tizz, and it was unanimously decided that action must be taken. IUCN wrote a letter to the Chilean President. Wow! I bet that shook him.

So there we are. I’m just here for two days, and the only thing that seemed important was a vote about protecting whales. Predictably the Japanese and Norwegians objected, so it got shelved.

But I suppose we have to keep on trying. The whole thing has cost twelve million Euro apparently, three-quarters of which put up by grateful Spanish taxpayers. The day after Black Friday, you could probably buy Iceland twice over for that. I hope they think they’ve got value for money.

Anyway, this being Barcelona, and to cheer us all up, do you remember the bit with Manuel in Fawlty Towers?

O’Reilly (to Manuel) “I need to speak to the boss, where is he?”
Manuel “Mrs Fawlty, she not here”
O’Reilly “ No, the Boss…… the Chief, the Gaffer, the Guvnor…… the Generalissimo…where is he?”
Manuel (pause, looks nervously about him)) “……in Madrid!”

Jeremy Hulme