Barcelona, the second largest city in Spain and the capital of Catalonia, is often defined by comparison with Madrid. Throughout the twentieth century, the widening gulf between the two cities has determined much of Catalonia's national ethos, itself defined by reference to Castilian-speaking Spain (Arkinstall 2004: 22). For Spaniards, Barcelona is both the place where European novelties first arrive in the Peninsula and also a narcissistically self-regarding city. Barcelona's physical peculiarities have both nourished and curtailed its political aspirations, but it has always been the driving force behind a Catalan nation with no state but a desire to define its identity in terms of literature, art, and culture.

As a port, Barcelona shares with other Mediterranean capitals more than a millennium of colonization and expansion. The physical constraints on the city, sandwiched between the mountains and the sea, have also made Barcelona extremely conscious of the importance of urban planning. There has been endless discussion of the city's charms, the labyrinthine medieval city has been shaped and reshaped by wave after wave of planners, and elaborate gardens of iron and cement have been created which have helped to make its architecture sharply distinct in character (Hughes 1992: x).

In the early twentieth century, Barcelona's literary heart was the humble district of La Ribera, a barrio wedged between the Ciudadela fortress and Las Ramblas Boulevard. This is the urban backdrop to Santiago Rusiñol's autobiographical novel L’auca del senyor Esteve (1907), a saga depicting three generations of a petit-bourgeois family of shopkeepers full of an ‘apolitical charm’ that would soon emulate the behavior of Castilian-speaking gentry. As a modernist painter and playwright, Rusiñol tried to redeem his own class by giving it a sense of beauty, art, and poetry. This tender evocation of the author's humble origins does nothing to hide his scorn for the hideous senyors Esteve who are unable to rescue their city from its sordid and petty limitations. Sr Esteve's economic rise from botigaire to landowner and his purchase of a villa in Gràcia foreshadows the modern Barcelona of luxurious mansions, apartment buildings, shops, and mausoleums side by side with the dilapidated old buildings, dirty alleys, slums, and barren lots of the Gothic quarter. As Josep Pla put it, L’auca contains two turn-of-the-century Barcelonas: the popular and the Parisian.