Barcelona

Why Barcelona wears a watch

The first edition had to be Barcelona for an unromantic reason: the laser workshop is here. But once you start asking why this city and not another, better reasons show up.

In 1859 Ildefons Cerdà drew a grid with its corners cut off at an angle. He did not do it for looks: he wanted carriages to turn without crashing, and light and air to reach a city that was dying of typhus inside its own walls. A hundred and sixty-odd years later, those cut corners are what makes Barcelona recognisable from the air, and they are the shape printed on the card of this first edition.

There is one thing Barcelona does better than almost any city: it can be walked. You can go from the sea to the hill on foot, crossing neighbourhoods that look nothing like each other, without taking anything. A thirty-five millimetre watch, light, that you do not mind getting wet, is exactly the watch for a city you cross on foot.

And then there are the hotels. Not the big ones on the Diagonal, though those too: the twenty-room ones in an Eixample building, with the wooden lift and a front desk of one person who knows your name by the second day. That person wears a watch. Almost always a cheap one, because it will get wet and it will get knocked, and because checking a phone in front of a guest looks bad.

That is the watch that was missing: one that works for both people in the scene. The one arriving with the suitcase and the one handing over the key.

One hundred pieces. The city printed on the dial and the number engraved on the back. When they are gone, this edition closes and does not come back.