SEPTEMBER HIGHLIGHT
Barcelona - City of Marvels
"Strolling through Barcelona in 1914, you might have been lucky enough to see the architect Antoni Gaudí sitting outside a café on the Avenida Diagonal in the company of the Portuguese modernist painter. In those extraordinary years for western art, Amadeo (who TAP paid homage to by baptising an A319 of its Airbus fleet, see page 144), left his Paris home to meet the master architect and see his masterpiece: the Sagrada Família cathedral. The moment was a unique one: from that year on and until his death in 1926, Gaudí dedicated his time exclusively to the great temple and Barcelona would experience the peak of economic and cultural progress that would distinguish it forever. Nowadays, like then, it is a place where “all codes of conduct are learnt”, in the words of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, one of the great Barcelona writers talking about the cosmopolitan nature of the city. This is where UP takes its readers this month, to a city where TAP flies every day of the year.
By showing the cultural multiplicity of Barcelona, from architectural brilliance to fashion designers, we demonstrate how the city that was dubbed “the city of marvels” continues to be one of the most vibrant Mediterranean cities on the Iberian Peninsula and very much de rigueur on the 21st-century grand tour.
In this edition we also offer you other destinations: the Amazon and Sydney Possuelo, Indian rights activist; the paradoxes of modern day Moscow; and, in the distant Atlantic, the seductive island of Faial, on the Azores archipelago. And Portugal never ceases to amaze us – just join artist Graça Morais on a journey around the region of Trás-os-Montes, in the north of the country, or check out how Portuguese intelligence and creativity is spread throughout the globe: meet Miguel Câncio Martins, one of the most important interior designers in the world and discover Critical Software, one of NASA’s chosen partners. (...)"
by Fernando Pinto, CEO TAP Portugal - in UP's Editorial September 2008
