The fan in my Poblenou flat does its best impression of a helicopter rotor, and I am awake at seven because the light here does not negotiate. You get August mornings in Barcelona that feel like a held breath, the air already thick by the time the bakers unlock their doors. I showered twice before nine. That is not a brag, it is a survival tactic.
Today is about paperwork. The NIE application I started yesterday has ballooned into a small paper monster, and I have learned my first lesson about Spanish bureaucracy: nothing happens on the first visit. You book a cita previa online, you show up with your passport and your photocopies and your patience, and you wait. But my temporary flat in Poblenou has a problem: the lease is short, and getting the empadronamiento, the official address registration, needs a padron certificate, and that needs my name on a contract. So I am walking to the nearest Ajuntament office with a folder of documents that feels both too heavy and too light.
The metro is my escape from the heat, but today the L1 is a mess. I check my phone on the platform: the line is cut between La Florida and Plaça de Sants, with Torrassa, Santa Eulàlia, and Mercat Nou closed for track renewal. They say it affects about 36,000 daily riders, and in August that means everyone left in the city is squeezed onto replacement buses. I take the L4 instead, which is chewing through Verdaguer station without stopping, a ghost train through a construction site. The interchange at Plaça de Catalunya is a maze of barriers and signs pointing you up to the street, so you cross the plaza in the sun and duck back down twelve minutes later. I do not mind. It is all texture, all material, and the air conditioning works.
I surface near the Born, the old medieval quarter that sits between the cathedral and the sea. The streets here are narrow, shaded, and mercifully cooler than the wide avenues of the Eixample. Two women sit outside a bar with a bottle of cava and half a dozen oysters, arguing softly about something that makes one of them laugh. A man naps open-mouthed on a bench in the tiny square, his cap over his eyes. This is the August city: those who can have fled to the coast or the Pyrenees, and those who remain move slower, talk quieter, and claim the city as their own. I like it.
My errand takes me to a Banc d'Espanya branch near Via Laietana. The bank manager, a woman in her fifties with the kind of calm that comes from handling decades of expats, explains the dance: passport, NIE, sometimes a certificate of non-residency, and then you wait for the account to open. For a non-resident account, the big names are CaixaBank, with their HolaBank programme for internationals, BBVA, Sabadell, Santander. Online-only options like N26 and Revolut give you a Spanish IBAN but cannot handle every direct debit, so many locals keep one of each. And when I ask how locals pay each other back for dinner, she laughs. Bizum. It is instant, it is everywhere, and you will not survive a dinner party without it. I make a mental note to download it before my first invitation.
Coffee is needed. I find a tiny place called ONIS COFFEE, two baristas, a gleaming machine, and a window looking out onto a street where a courier has stopped to let a cat cross. A café con leche costs about two euros, and I sit for a while, watching the slow August ballet of delivery vans and tourists with maps, and I think about how the city works when the locals leave. The hotels are full, the queues outside the Picasso Museum snake around the block, and yet the bakeries close for two weeks. The paradox is everywhere: the city is more crowded and less full at the same time.
The solar eclipse on the 12th has been on my mind. I heard it from a woman at the bank, who mentioned it as if it were a family birthday. A near-total eclipse at sunset, the first in 121 years and the last until 2180, and southern Catalonia is in the path of totality. To be honest, I do not know what that will look like from here, but she said the museums are giving away certified glasses and Montjuïc Castle is hosting a special viewing. I have put it in my calendar. It feels like the kind of thing you tell your grandchildren about, and I do not have grandchildren, but I have a podcast, so that counts.
I follow the smell of grilled squid down Carrer de Montcada, past the medieval palaces that now house the Picasso Museum. It is one of those streets that does not want you to know it is beautiful, with stone facades and carved lintels that have seen five hundred summers. A sign announces pa amb tomàquet, and I am gone. A lunch set, the menú del día, is about twelve to fifteen euros, and it is the best deal in the city: bread rubbed with tomato and oil, a plate of patatas bravas, a slice of esqueixada, that salt-cod salad with tomatoes and onions, and a glass of the house wine. I sit at a bar called La Lolita Barcelona, where a man in his seventies is feeding a piece of bread to a small dog under his stool, and I understand something about this place.
The afternoon is for wandering. I cross the Ronda de Sant Pere and dip into the Gràcia district, which was its own village until the city swallowed it. The plaza there, Plaça del Sol, is a sun-trap of stone and shade, with kids kicking a ball and old men playing cards at a plastic table. In August, the whole neighbourhood is preparing for the Festa Major, and I see ladders leaning against balconies, someone testing string lights, a grandmother inspecting a paper dragon. The whole thing is a handmade magic trick, streets decorated by the people who live on them, and it makes me want to stay for it.
But the flat hunt calls. The word on the street is that rents in Barcelona have gone mad since 2022, and a modest one-bedroom in the centre now runs somewhere between eleven hundred and fourteen hundred euros a month, while the outskirts are closer to eleven hundred. I have a budget, and I have a list of places to see in the Eixample, where the grid of Ildefons Cerdà turns every corner into a possible beginning. The superilles, the car-free superblocks, have changed the pace of life here, turning some intersections into little parks with benches and planters, and I sit on one for a while, watching a woman read a book on a bench, and I think, yes, I could do this.
Evening falls and the city changes clothes. The heat drops, the terraces fill, and the lights come on in the Modernista buildings. I find a table at a place called Doña Rosa - Cocina Urbana, near the Sagrada Família, and I order bravas and a caña, about three euros for the beer, and I watch the basilica turn gold against the blue hour. Gaudí's unfinished masterpiece is a construction site with a cathedral inside it, and there is something moving about the way it just keeps going, like a sentence that refuses to end.
I walk back toward El Born through the alleys of the Gothic Quarter, past the shadow of the cathedral, and the night is soft and full of the smell of grilled meat and cannabis. A group of young men plays acoustic guitars on a step, a cover of a song I half-recognise, and I drop a coin in the hat because it feels right. The Palau de la Música Catalana glows behind its glass, a jewel box of Modernista tiles, and I stand outside a while.
The day ends like this: I sit on my balcony in Poblenou and drink a glass of cava, looking out at the sea, which is not invisible, just dark. The eclipse is ten days away. The papers are not done. The account is not open. But I have eaten well, I have walked twenty thousand steps, and I have learned the rhythm of the city in August, which is slow and full of ghosts. The locals who left are not gone; they are just elsewhere, and the city talks to itself in a quieter voice. I think I will be okay here. I think I will be better than okay.
The fan spins. The cava glass sweats. Tomorrow, the paperwork again, and maybe a trip to the Mercat de Sant Antoni for figs. But tonight, the city hums, and I hum with it.
That is all for now. Visca l'estiu, as they say. Safer to say it in the summer, when they all do. Until next time, the streets are still warm and the stories are still unwritten.