When Ann King left school in the early 1970s, Ireland was just about to enter the old EEC – the European Economic Community, forerunner to the European Union.
“My strength was languages, and I did a one-year course in the Language Centre of Ireland, where I studied French and Italian as well as office/business skills and learned a lot.”
At the end of that year socialising with a lot of older students from different countries, the Churchtown woman was “even less interested in spending three or four years in a university than when I had left school,” she recalls.
In the summer of 1972, she worked in Paris, Switzerland and Munich and eventually ended up in Brussels just as Ireland entered the EEC and Patrick Hillery became the first Irish commissioner a year later.
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From 1977 she worked in multinational companies and then Pfizer as an editorial assistant in the clinical research area preparing reports. She stayed for seven years “and loved it”.
When they moved the department to England, where she didn’t want to live, she decided to learn another language and went to Barcelona. Apart from two spells in Ireland, “I have been here ever since, for 45 years – a long time”.
Spain at the time was becoming a democracy and she remembers an attempted coup d’état in 1981.
“I was lucky to get a job in the book business in one of Spain’s largest bookshops and worked there for seven years in an uptown area of the city.”
You can live and never speak the local language but is that what you want?
In 1988, when the company moved into the distribution business rather than traditional bookselling, she left and became a specialist medical translator “and that is what I have been doing ever since. And though I am now retired, I still do bits,” she says.
A few years earlier, in 1983, she bought an apartment in the centre of the city near the port, La Rambla and the Liceu Opera House.
“People are always amazed that even though we live in a dense city, it is so quiet. Our back window overlooks the 18th-century San Augustin parish church and the convent of the Missionaries of Charity, and we hear their voices praying in the morning.”
She married American Dick Edelstein in 1990, a former English language teacher and translator who is now retired and a poet, the couple live in an 19th-century house built on the convent’s monastic cloister.
“I love the fact that the city has very good transport and that most of what you need is in your barrio [neighbourhood] – and where we live you don’t need a car. It’s a lively city with great social and cultural life – opera, dance, cinema, exhibition, lectures. Theatre is in Catalan.
“There are fiestas for everything and seasonal community events – celebrations of all kinds.”
Other advantages include universal healthcare, good schools and beautiful beaches including the city’s own Barceloneta. Skiing in the Pyrenees can be reached in a couple of hours by car, there are great connections by air and train and it is easy to get out of the city for the day with a high-speed train to Madrid in under three hours. There are also many beautiful places, towns and villages within an hour of the city.
“Despite rising prices, it is still possible to get a flat,” she says. “A couple from Dublin recently found a small two-bedroom apartment in my neighbourhood for €1,300 a month, something they could not have dreamed of in Dublin.”
The Boqueria market has now been largely abandoned by locals and sells mostly fast food
King says disadvantages of life in Barcelona include Spanish bureaucracy, which can be frustrating and confusing.
“You need to apply to get a tax number but there are no appointments. You need a tax number to work, but now because so many people are coming in (one million alone from Latin America) they are not issuing tax numbers and you can’t get a tax number unless you have a job. And jobs are no longer as easy to find – there is more supply than demand.”
Climate change has also had its effects. “It has made the summer months difficult in the city. Night-time temperatures above 25 degrees and high humidity make it hard to sleep unless you have air conditioning, which is expensive to install and to run. It is a big city; there are a lot of tourists, especially in the summer months, and some people find this oppressive.”
Many people feel they are losing their neighbourhood way of life too, she says, “which is partly due to modernisation, though politicians, as in Ireland, blame it on Airbnb, tourists and digital nomads. The Boqueria market has now been largely abandoned by locals and sells mostly fast food.”
It is an autonomous region. “You are in Catalonia and not in Spain – with an independence movement and a long history,” she says. “The language in schools is Catalan, which has more of a French and Provençal structure than Spanish – it’s between Italian, Spanish and French and much easier to learn.”
“You can live and never speak the local language but is that what you want? Some foreigners integrate and some don’t.”
This is not a city where people live close to big green spaces. “You must take a metro to connect to nature on Montjuic or the Collserola [natural park]. There are lovely hidden squares, however, where thousands of trees have been planted in the last couple of decades and more of the city is pedestrianised than before with great success. But the Barcelona metropolitan area remains densely populated.”
She keeps in touch with family in Ireland more now than when she first moved.
“When I first went to Barcelona, it was a question of a phone call once or twice a month. Flights were expensive and there were no direct flights. Cheap air travel changed all that and I have more contact now with family at home than I would have if I lived in Ireland.”
