Come to Barcelona soon

When I was a kid, I used to live very close to the bull ring in Barcelona. From the spring to September there were bull fights which I occasionally attended. Most of the time I didn't go, but our passtime was to watch the tourists (and their funny clothes, or in some cases almost lack of them, to be honest) that parked their coaches in our street. In those years, before the Olympic Games of 1992, we only saw tourists on Sundays because they came for the day to the city to the bull fight from the Costa Brava. In Barcelona, there were not many hotels back then. Another way to see tourists was to go to Montserrat (a mountain near Barcelona) in summer, where visitors from the beaches also came for the day. Since the Olympic Games tourists now stay in Barcelona. They have many hotels and now more or less legal tourist appartments. That does not mean that Barcelona has not been a city of visitors. Most of our touristic assets were here before the Olympic Games, like the Gaudí buildings, the nice weather and... yes, the immortal Rambla where a horrible terrorist attack took place on Thursday. That is the pedestrian street, itself a monument to diversity and freedom, which had seen George Orwell, Pablo Picasso, Federico García Lorca, Gabriel García Márquez and many others walking up and down the avenue. Some of our occasional visitors come for a few days or for an academic course and then decide to stay and join us as citizens of Barcelona. And some of them become partners of those that were here before, and even come to lead our associations, political parties or even municipalities. Only a couple of decisions separate a tourist from a local. All those of us who can organize anything know the power of the subject matter "Invitation to Barcelona" in an email. Because of this power (exerted by myself personally or others, we all know the trick) I have been able to spend time with people I admire in my profession, like Paul Levine, Jon Stern, Neil Rickman, Sam Bowles, Branko Milanovic, Glenn Woroch, Maitreesh Gattak, Antonio Estache, Massimo Florio, Eduardo Saavedra, Miguel A. Montoya, Jean Tirole and others. And I am also happy to having spent time with other visitors with whom I don't have professional links. In the last ten to fifteen years, I have had literally hundreds of foreign students in the Autonomous University of Barcelona and its associated courses. I expect to have more this academic course. Every time I start with a new group I feel a sense of excitement for getting in touch with individuals with such varied backgrounds, a sense of excitement that I only hope it is shared by them. All of them will enjoy our street life and be part of us. This is an open city, this is everybody's city. Among the casualties of Thursday's attack the official version says that there are more than thirty nationalities. That's surely wrong. If they followed the appeal of Barcelona, surely many of them as individuals were multinational, multilingual and multicultural. Therefore, it should be thirty times the number of nationalities inside each of them. It could have been any of us, but we are not afraid. To all of the visitors that have been here before and to all those that will join us for the first time, I say: please come soon.