🐈-alonia Photo Diary #2

No es permet fer petons al Cul de la Lleona

Jun 10, 2022

Miau miau outside Tarragona Cathedral, Spain

Well, this has been quite an adventure. I write from the relative safety of a beachside apartment in Calella de Palafrugell, a peaceful former fishing village on Spain’s Costa Brava about two hours north of Barcelona. After surviving Primavera Sound Weekend 1 AKA Fyre Fest España (more on this next week), we were set to hit the road in a rental car to explore stunning vistas and sleepy villages along Spain’s rugged coastline. That is until a truck driver merged into a lane we were occupying, leaving us unscathed but causing extensive damage to the car.

We were fortunate to be unharmed but our plans required immediate modification. From a truck stop restaurant outside Barcelona, we decided to scrap our plans for a weekend road trip and instead relax in the twin villages of Calella de Palafrugell and Llfranc, both reachable by public transportation and thankfully far enough away from the particular smell of urine, cigarettes, and vermut that we’ve become accustomed to in Barcelona.

Since the theme of our last weekend in Spain is relaxation, this won’t be a long post either. Instead, I will continue my cat-centric observations from last week.

I haven’t discovered a compelling reason for cats to be so prominent all over Catalonia. One interesting factoid comes courtesy a 2017 New York Times article: the .cat domain was successfully co-opted as the official domain of Catalonia, despite efforts by the Spanish government in Madrid to shut it down or censor it (part of the central government’s intensive crackdown during that year’s independence referendum). As of writing, there are 112,641 urls with the .cat suffix, mostly registered in the south east of Spain with a few notable exceptions (see nyan.cat).

Here is another sampling of cat street art and other cat-related things I’ve seen around Barcelona, Tarragona, Girona, and the Costa Brava.