Barcelona

A sharp, self-aware exploration of a city caught between identity and image—part of Travel with a Writer, The Walking Tree’s series pairing leading authors with the cities they know best. 

Barcelona has learned how to be seen. Once shaped by its own rhythms, it now moves under constant observation—its streets, neighborhoods, and symbols reframed through the expectations of millions who arrive each year. 

Writing from the perspective of someone who was born there, left, and returned, Anna Pazos traces the tensions that define the contemporary city: between past and present, local life and global spectacle, intimacy and display. What emerges is not a fixed identity, but an ongoing negotiation—one that raises a more unsettling question: what happens when a place becomes too accomplished at being itself?

Blending cultural critique with close observation, the book moves through the city’s contradictions with precision and wit. 

Clear-eyed, incisive, and deeply attuned to the pressures facing contemporary cities, this is an exploration of Barcelona at a moment of reckoning—and of what it means for a place to remain itself.

In Travel with a Writer,