Barcelona Ready for World to Take Note : Olympics: In 1992, the Summer Games and World’s Fair will bring international spotlight to Spain.

This just in: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

In national news: The country’s new slogan, “Spain: The Rising Star of Europe,” reflects the new Spanish eagerness not to be left out of the 12-nation European Community on the occasion of the continent’s economic unification next year. Besides the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, the 1992 World’s Fair will be staged in Seville. With Franco still dead, Spain at last wants to be on that big bus to the future with its progressive neighbors.

Meanwhile, locally: With the Barcelona Olympic Games one year away, and with Franco still dead, this is no time for the proudly autonomous region of Catalonia to hide from the inevitable Olympic spotlight and allow Spain to get all of the credit. Around town these days, virtually every sporting event features spectators’ dramatic unfurlings of the Catalan flag, often accompanied by calls to “Free Catalonia.” Plus, there was a recent petitioning of the International Olympic Committee to grant Catalonia its own separate Olympic team.

Foreign visitors to Barcelona report confusion in finding the Catalan capital does not specialize in the usual Spanish cliches of bullfights and castanets and senoritas wearing bright flowers in their jet-black hair; rather, there is a more European, avant-garde look and feel. Furthermore, most outsiders are taken aback when greeting Barcelona natives in Spanish -- “Buenos dias” -- only to be answered in Catalan -- “Bon dia.”

And here’s a business update: Roughly $7.5 billion is being spent for a massive Barcelona face-lift -- transportation, telecommunications, housing, beachfront renovations and sewage modernization. Naturally, the Olympic Games are the excuse for this overdue urban renewal binge, but Barcelona politicians note that only one-sixth of the $7.5 billion is being spent on sports facilities. The city council already is conducting regular tours of the various physical improvements for local residents, under the name of “Barcelona ‘93,” to stress that work is being done for the future, not just for the ’92 Games.

Now this:

The correct pronunciation is Bartha-loan-a, with the “th” sound instead of a soft “c” in the middle. Legend has it that a long ago Catalan king, Felipe XV, had a terrible lisp, and rather than seem to be making fun of him, his subjects copied his speech patterns.

Few corners of the Earth are as saturated with as many unknown tidbits of origin as Catalonia, “unknown” mostly due to a few temporarily successful attempts by Spanish authorities to suppress Catalan culture in this northeast corner of the nation. During the most recent example of this, Franco’s dictatorship, there were signs throughout Catalonia proclaiming belligerently, “In Franco’s Spain, We Speak Spanish!” -- an attitude that explains the Catalans’ stubbornness, now, to converse in their own language, though they speak and understand Spanish. (For the Olympics, Catalan is the first of four “official languages” to be used, the others being Spanish, English and French.)

Also, the Franco backlash explains why a traveler in Barcelona had better have a current map; as soon as Franco was gone in 1975, after lingering for what seemed like forever, street names were changed back from Spanish to Catalan. Avenues went from being avenida to avinguda; streets from calle to carrer; squares from plaza to placa. Even people’s names reverted from Spanish to Catalan: Fernando to Ferran, Jaime to Jaume, Manuel to Manel, Juan to Joan.

A major beauty of the Olympics is their way of putting all of this on the table: politics, regionalism, economy, roots. Historically, host cities (and, by extension, host nations) have used the Games as a handy vehicle for convincing mankind either of the righteousness of their particular way of life; or, at least, of their vision. In the case of Catalonia -- separate, as it always has considered itself, from the rest of Spain -- the emphasis is being put on the legacy of originality and experimentation. Seny i rauxa, goes an old Catalan motto; “prudence and daring.” With the emphasis on “daring.”

Catalonia gave us Picasso. (Well, actually, he wasn’t born here, but he spent all of his productive years in his adopted Barcelona.) And Christopher Columbus. (Well, in fact, he generally is thought to have been born in Genoa, Italy, but there is strong local tradition that he is a native Catalan; anyway, his big adventure to the New World started from Barcelona.)

Spain has been described as a land “ripped from hot Africa, soldered crudely to inventive Europe.” But closest to the soldering joint, coziest to inventive Europe, is Catalonia. Physically and historically.

A century and a half before the Magna Carta was supposed to have represented the first historic declaration of individual rights, Catalans claim to have established an embryonic form of democracy. They called it the usatges, a code defining the mutual rights and responsibilities of both rulers and their subjects, passed by the Catalan parliament in 1068. Medieval Catalonia, with a dominant Mediterranean presence reaching into most of Italy and parts of Greece in the 14th Century, boasted an emerging bourgeoisie, less differentiation between social classes and the possibility of moving from one class to another through hard work. Radical stuff for the time.

But then, the same King Ferdinand who sponsored Columbus also whittled away at Catalan rights; among those, Catalonia’s participation in the exploitation of newly discovered territories in America. It was Ferdinand, too, who with his queen, Isabella, introduced the Inquisition, and despite Barcelona’s vigorous opposition, that pogrom left the city with a mere 18,000 residents at the dawning of the 16th Century.

So while Columbus lives on in a 185-foot statue on Barcelona’s waterfront, forever pointing toward America, Ferdinand is still dead.

Also, as proof of Columbus’ round-world hypothesis, Catalonia’s have-have-not cycle repeated itself. By the end of the 19th Century, mostly through foreign imports, the region again had made itself the most powerful economic force in Spain. Its bourgeoisie, therefore, could afford to send their children to study in Paris and London, which resulted in a whole new face for the city of Barcelona; between 1870 and 1900, medieval walls were pulled down and replaced by the Parisian-style tree-line boulevards evident today.

Symbolizing this rediscovered Catalan prosperity was the huge international exhibition of 1888 in Barcelona, which drew so many foreign visitors a ship had to be fitted out as a floating hotel in the Mediterranean.

The reprise: For next summer’s Olympics, 104 years later, so many tourists will descend upon Barcelona there will be 16 ships fitted out as floating hotels.

As long ago as the early 2nd Century, 129 A.D., Barcelona had its first Olympic victory, in the person of chariot racer Lucius Minicius Natalis Quadronius Verus. As long ago as 1924, barely more than a quarter century after Baron Pierre de Coubertin revived the Games in the Modern Olympic era, Barcelona bid to be host. On an inspection tour of the city, de Coubertin gushed: “Before I came to Barcelona, I thought I knew what a sporting city was.”

So, by 1929, Barcelona had built its Olympic stadium, above the Mediterranean shore on a hill known as Montjuic, in anticipation of staging the 1936 Games. When those Games were awarded to Berlin instead, Lluis Companys, the passionately anti-Fascist Catalan president at the time, arranged for a 1936 People’s Olympiad at Montjuic, which was to open on July 22, 1936.

But three days earlier, on July 19, with athletes from several countries already in town, the Spanish Civil War broke out, a bloody, chaotic three-year rehearsal for World War II, canceling the People’s Olympiad. In one of the Civil War’s first major battles, during which 500 were killed and 3,000 wounded in Barcelona, Companys emerged victorious, although, by January of 1939, he was among the columns of refugees fleeing north to France in the face of Franco’s Fascist troops. With the subsequent Nazi occupation of France, Companys was arrested, handed over to Spanish authorities, court martialed at the Montjuic Castle for “military rebellion,” and executed in October, 1940.

His last request: That he be allowed to remove his shoes, so that he might die with his feet touching Catalan soil. And now the irony is that Franco is still dead, but Companys lives on as a patriot and martyr. With the Olympics bringing the most intense international focus to Spain since the Franco-induced Civil War, the one commemorative plaque in the north portal of the refurbished Estadi Montjuic, site of the Olympic Opening Ceremonies a year from now, remembers: “Lluis Companys, president of Catalonia, organizer of the Popular Olympics of 1936. Executed here.”

Franco is still dead, but Wilfred the Hairy ( Guifre el Pilos, in Catalan) lives on in the Catalan “national” flag. The legend is that Wilfred, wounded in a 9th Century battle with the Moors, dipped his four fingers into his own spilled blood and dragged them across his gilded shield, thus forming the four horizontal red bars on a yellow background. For Olympic visitors, that red-and-yellow striped flag will be one of the more obvious sights in this city of 1.7 million, seen at least as often as the similar Spanish flag (two red bars, one yellow).

Also impossible for visitors to miss: The sardana, Catalonia’s “national” dance played out in plazas after church services on Sundays, with crowds joining hands to solemnly pace and retrace their steps.

And: The Tibidabo, the odd-shaped mountain rising abruptly behind Barcelona that is said to have been the hill from which Satan showed Jesus the nations of the world, and now is home to both a towering cathedral and a huge amusement park.

And: Las Ramblas, the tree-line promenade through old Barcelona, leading to the waterfront and the Columbus statue, with its open market of flowers, birds, fruits, vegetables, fish and meat, foreign papers and magazines; as well as its mix of tourists and moving shell games. (Moving, especially, when police appear).

And: The gaudy architecture of the appropriately named Antoni Gaudi, from his failed city-within-a-park with its Old-Lady-in-a-Shoe-type houses to his still unfinished sand-castle of a cathedral called the Sagrada Familia. Now 109 years since work began, the Sagrada Familia exists as a towering Barcelona landmark, though it still doesn’t have a roof, its insides nothing but a construction site.

They’re still working on the spires!

George Orwell, in his book, “Homage to Catalonia,” about his own experiences fighting with Catalan militia against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, described the Sagrada Familia as “one of the most hideous buildings in the world ... I think the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance.” But like so much of what is uniquely Catalan, the Sagrada Familia -- “the reflection of the soul of the people,” wrote Catalan poet Joan Maragall, grandfather of Barcelona’s current mayor, Pasqual Maragall -- was embraced as an emblem of perseverance in the face of repression.

Japanese businessmen -- there has been a rush of Japanese companies, now numbering almost 100, to Catalonia since Franco’s death -- say they could finish the Sagrada Familia by next year, but finishing it has ceased to be the point as much as continuing the work.

During Franco’s rule, cranes and workers labored in fits and starts over Gaudi’s cathedral, long after Gaudi died in 1926, and Catalans saw the slow process being as triumphant as any native’s successes in foreign music festivals, or any victories by the passionately followed F.C. (for Football Club) Barcelona, the city’s top professional soccer team.

The home stadium for the Blau Grana (Catalan for the blue and wine-red purple that are F.C. Barcelona’s colors) is among the largest in the world, seating 120,000; as de Coubertin said: Until you go to Barcelona, you just think you know what a sporting city is. Field hockey is big here, too, with golf and tennis beginning to come into vogue. Basketball is the boom sport of the last decade, the major reason a new 17,000-seat arena could be built on Montjuic for the Olympics -- it opened last fall -- with no fear of being able to fill it after the Games. Barcelona claims more than 1,300 sports centers and another 1,200 public and private sports clubs.

But, of course, Olympic Barcelona does not care to be simply a monument to sports; rather, a public recapturing of its occasionally misplaced soul. To the world, Catalonia happily presents itself in the spirit of the Olympic mascot, “the friendly little avant-garde dog,” Cobi: Different things from different angles, like Catalan artist Salvador Dali’s painting of Gala. From up close, this Dali work appears merely a view, from behind, of his nude wife peering through a window at the sea; step back 20 yards or so, and it becomes a computer-like image of Abraham Lincoln’s face.

Whatever you see, Barcelona is saying (in the grand Olympic tradition): Look at us.

Now’s the time. What’s-his-name is still dead.