The Climb – Parc Carmell, Barcelona

The city has peaks, as the distance does. In the north of Barcelona, Parc Carmell backs onto the famous Parc Guell. In early November it was still desiccated from the summer heat. We’d come to Parc Guell from the crowds of the city’s nineteenth-century Eixample, to join the crowd snaking from the Metro to Gaudi’s park – which when we arrived was more crowded still, with people queuing round the edge of the best-known bits for what looked like hours. My wife and I had seen the “trencadi” designs some years before, so we decided not to join the queues. Our trip to see architecture quickly became an exploration.

Our daughter’s child eyes reminded us how many things are there to be enjoyed just in the normal course of walking around. First we looked out over the city, and the sea beyond, but very soon attention was seized by the parrots (or parakeets) flitting around in the palm trees overhead. They were bright and stubby, and shrieked every time they moved along a branch. One sat in a twiggy nest, while another squawked from just outside.

How exotic – except, as we talked, we thought about London’s green parakeets, which my wife and I had first noticed along the Thames near Richmond, but which now are everywhere, to our daughter’s delight.

As soon as we started to climb the dry hill above the crowds we saw several cactus plants, and on a wall of rock through which the path was cut, a lizard with a tail stub – it must have been attacked, and shed the rest of its tail as a decoy. When our daughter chased it, it skittered off, reflecting the sun on its eyes and back. The lizard was unexpected, what with the noise rattling up from the queues, and trails of people passing us on their way down the face of the hill – although, again, we remembered seeing common lizards basking in heathland in mid Wales.

The paths kept rising, with white rocks and white dust on either side. Overhead, the trees’ narrow leaves were dark against the grey of their wood and the dry blue of the sky. Our daughter alternately scurried up, and then complained about the climb. The prospect of more lizards kept her going, but they were soon forgotten after we entered Parc Carmell.

Here a stony lookout point displays the grid of nineteenth-century Barcelona, and the cram of buildings in the Barri Gotic down towards the sea. For grown-ups this may be the whole point of the climb. But for young children (or at least the one we’d brought) the appeal of the place was in the mass of stones and roots at one end of the viewpoint – somewhere to jump and balance, and pretend your lived there always: “La Nina de las Piedras”, dusty, ragged and cheeky, and quicker than a mountain goat.

Being a grown-up, and a restless one, I was distracted by the idea of a route up higher, to the very top of the hill, which would give a view not just of the city, but also of the sierra behind, so after leaving “La Nina” with “La Madre de las Piedras”, I went off to scout a way up.

The first route led round the hill and toward a straggly neighbourhood – I didn’t have time to explore. When I retraced my steps back through the hunched, monochrome trees (how different from those a year before, see "Tree Cover" also in Open Field), I found the other two vagabonds waiting for me, and looking up a steep path that went towards the summit.

The wild girl of the hills was sure she could make it up to the top. OK, we said, and off she went, following the narrow track between spines of bushes, over loose pebbles. We followed, carrying the bags and bits you need for travelling with a child.

“Brave girl,” said a Chinese man as she scrambled up the final steep. “I am,” she said.

There were a couple of groups up there on the top, and we sat among them, looking down at the view. The hugeness of the city stretched deep into the hills. But around us drifted butterflies – a couple of kinds of swallowtail not seen in England, but also what I know as an Adonis blue, a small flake of colour over the dry ground.

Once again there were rocks our daughter could jump between, while we looked out at the sea. The people round us were taking hundreds of photographs. I’m not really a snapper, but I did wonder if I should make a blog piece out of the experience…

The air seemed stripped of everything but the blue of the sky – although our daughter’s excitement at being “higher than the planes” as they came into land on the far side of Barcelona’s huge port gave the lie to that idea. Around us, seed-heavy plants knocked against each other in the breeze.

I suppose it’s a common enough experience to want the world to have stopped while you’re at the top of a hill, so that it’s possible to enjoy forever a beauty both alive in the present but also static and untroubling. Looking out over Barcelona, I felt it. I was with my family, I saw animal and plant life (at least apparently) thriving over the rocks, and the great city seemed to be stored with potential, as London does, or Oxford, especially at night when all the lights are on in the college windows. But as every grown-up knows, the world does not exist in potential.

Birds that are also common in England provided the admonitory spectacle. First we saw a kestrel its feathers a little darker than the ones close to where we live. It flew like a sharp thought, then hovered over the trees below. Out of these shot jackdaws, two shapes both black and gold as their feathers caught the light.

The kestrel turned as they attacked it, diving and rolling to strike back. But jackdaws do not like a bird of prey on their patch, and persisted, pushing the kestrel back towards the buildings at the edge of the park.

As they did so, another dark-brown shape arrived, another kestrel, which struck at the first, ignoring the jackdaws. The original kestrel, desperate, dived against the backdrop of the Eixample, marked a long low curve and landed on a phone mast placed on the roof of a school. Satisfied, the other birds withdrew.

Metaphors taken from the behaviour of wild animals are dubious, and there’s no equivalence between the behaviour of these birds and, say, that of pretended capitalists. Humans are moral agents, and birds, however intelligent, are not.

But the violence of the sequence, the movement of the bodies, were sure indicators that we had to go back down, filter through the trees and return to the ground.