The next day, the sun was still beginning to lick
the gentle curves of the treeless hills.
Pepetela, Angolan writer, in: Tales of Death
An unforgettable landscape surrounded me the other day, while I was traveling: the Tapajós National Forest, seen from the top of one of its hills. From there, seated in the shade of a kapok tree, my eyes spread the green all the way to the near bank of the river. In the middle of it, a barge was carrying grain out to the world. And, already losing its sharpness, the far bank returns to my eyes, dissolving into the sfumato of the setting sun. That imagery always comes back to my retina whenever I admire other landscapes.
For wandering the world paying attention to views, colors, and directions, I find myself always placing the human being at the center of the palette and the planet. That is why I called on Pepetela for the epigraph, to give voice to the curves that Antonio Gaudí traced in Catalonia.
Both at the foot of the Sagrada Família and from the heights of Montjuïc, in Barcelona, there is an expanse of breathtaking beauty. From there, the spires of the Sagrada Família rise above the city, drawing the eye in, set against the monochromatic urban plane under the reflections of the last rays of sunlight, with the shadow of the mountains in the background. A Carioca would immediately quip, with their eternal humor: "just like the hills of Rio de Janeiro."
(A note: this is not meant as a negative image; it is simply a translation of Pepetela, in his Tales of Death, about the treeless hills, replaced by dwellings.)
As a traveling outsider in thought, I soon reflected: what connects us when we correlate Barcelona with the Amazon rainforest mentioned at the beginning of this text? It all begins with the striking image that stood out: the Sagrada Família, at 172.5 meters tall. It is the defining landmark of the Barcelona skyline. The structure deliberately falls short of the height of the mountains out of respect for God, the creator of all — so Gaudí portrayed it — knowing that Catalonia, marked by the Gothic Quarter, had been the cradle and pinnacle of Christian civilization.
When borrowing Gaudí's eyes, one perceives in his works a deep respect for Christianity; yet, by reproducing the forms of nature in his many sculptures scattered across the city, he draws more from Baruch Spinoza, for whom God and nature are one and the same, with Gaudí merely an interpreter.
Another nature he admired was the human one. In La Pedrera, the so-called "lung space," right at the entrance, is a system of natural ventilation and thermal regulation at the center of the semicircular residential building spanning several floors. In the entrance atrium, he treats the work as an ecosystem functioning just like the respiratory system. Looking up at the ceiling, the polyhedral image of the pulmonary alveolus is revealed, with the sky visible beyond. Thus, Gaudí was able to embody Spinoza within a mineral forest of stone and creativity, transforming Barcelona into something vibrant, perhaps even delirious.
One might say that human beings do not live in natural environments alone; above all, they need to create an aesthetic that calms the heart and eases the breath. That is what Gaudí did.
And so, upon climbing to the highest point of Montjuïc to take in that view of Barcelona, he builds the cathedral and so many other works solely to relieve the eye from the sight of a deforested city. Then he descends the hill and goes on to face the challenge of giving life to stone.
If the Amazon on this side represents a deep indigenous memory — origin, biodiversity, the slow rhythm of nature — Barcelona, in turn, symbolizes the human capacity to transform belief, aesthetics, and geometry into tangible civilization, leaving a cruel question as to whether Sapiens is trying to define itself as guardian… or predator.
Surely the human destiny does not lie in choosing between forests and cathedrals, but in discovering whether our intelligence will mature before we destroy the natural and symbolic foundations that sustain us — or perhaps these are different manifestations of the same human narrative: one shaped by evolution over millions of years; the other by collective imagination in just a few centuries. This suggests that each identity is not merely territory, but an affective repertoire, through which we travel — we from here to there, and they from there to here — to better understand this consonance of gazes.
Translation produced with AI assistance.
Roger Normando, professor of thoracic surgery, Universidade Federal do Pará, Brazil.
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