2026 marks a century since the death of the visionary Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. He died after being hit by a tram in central Barcelona in June 1926, not far from the Sagrada Famìlia, his towering basilica that – despite still being under construction today – dominates the city’s skyline, and recently became the world’s tallest church.

Next year, 2027, will mark the 10 year anniversary of another tragedy. On August 17, 2017, terrorists pledging their allegiance to the Islamic State rammed a vehicle along the pedestrian boulevard of Las Ramblas, one of Barcelona’s main thoroughfares, killing 14 people. They were motivated, at least in part, by a desire to restore Muslim rule over Spain.

But these Spanish Muslim terrorists had essentially attacked part of Spain’s Muslim past. Las Ramblas comes from the Arabic word raml for “sand”. Before it was urbanised, Las Ramblas was a wadi, a dry river bed.

However, the attackers’ original plan was to place bombs in Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia. This would have carried a similar irony to the strike on Las Ramblas. Though a devout Christian, Gaudí used Islamic motifs throughout his architecture, including Casa Vicens and Park Guell, which are extensively decorated with Moorish-style tiles known as azulejo in Spanish, a word that comes from the Arabic al-zalij.

The bombs were never detonated because the terrorists made faulty explosive devices that ended up destroying their own safe house in the small seaside town of Alcanar, on the Catalan-Valencian border. Here, the pattern repeats: “al”, which translates as “the” in Arabic, features in the names of countless Spanish towns and cities.

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