I found this hysterical article in the NYTimes the other day about the famous naked biker guy in Barcelona who sadly (well its actually not that sad) we dont see around anymore. I thought this article was really interesting and Mr. Ribas has a really unique story. I was told about him before I got here but thankfully i never had to see him riding his bike naked...a 62 year old naked man on a bike doesnt sound pleasant. I think this is an interesting article because it is in an American newspaper and obviously americans are a lot more modest and reserved when it comes to nudity.
One year he was stopped by the police 30 times, and released again each time because he was not breaking the law. “I do it to show that it’s normal,” said Mr. Ribas, 62, a retired bank employee who is president of the Association for the Defense of the Right to Nudity, as he sipped wine and munched ham slices.
The annual exercise began in 2004 because that was the year that the Barcelona City Council subsidized a brochure with the intriguing title, “Expressing Yourself in Nudity.” Illustrated with photos of ordinary citizens naked on the street, in the subway and in the city’s parks, it affirmed categorically that the law “does not contain any article for sanctions against public nudity.”
It went on to say that the city respected “the right of the citizenry to
nudism,” and boasted that one year earlier, in 2003, no fewer than 7,000 people volunteered to undress together in Barcelona.
It was a vast unclad art project organized by the American photographer
Spencer Tunick, who had already photographed massed nudes in New York, Melbourne, São Paulo and Santiago, Chile.
To be sure, neither Mr. Tunick nor the city council brochure the following year set off a wave of public nudity. Asked how many Barcelonans took advantage of the law’s liberalism, Mr. Ribas sheepishly replied, “Very few.”
But even for those very few, the season for legal nudity may be drawing to a close. Earlier this year, a committee of the city council approved a draft resolution empowering the police to stop people on the street who were naked or improperly dressed and to require them to cover themselves or face fines of up to $700. The full council is expected to approve the measure in late April.
A deputy mayor from the governing Socialist Party, Assumpta Escarp, acknowledged almost apologetically that the law was aimed not so much at nakedness in the streets as at improper dress. “In recent years it’s been not so much nudity, but semi-nude attire,” she said, “people going from the beach to the city, to museums and churches, in beach attire.”
Mr. Tunick’s art event (in which she did not take part) was “an artistic expression,” she said. “It’s another thing to visit the Sagrada Familia in a bikini.” That was a reference to the church by the architect Antoni Gaudí, a major tourist destination.
Barcelona has its nude beaches, she said, but nudity on the street was not an acute problem, though there was one well-known activist who habitually rode the subway in the altogether. “There are three or four activists of nudism” in all, she said.
Pamela Oliver, 28, who works in a restaurant behind the town hall, agrees. “I’ve seen maybe three or four people in the street, but they’ve never come in here,” she said, adding that Barcelonans, mostly singles, frequent nude beaches along the Mediterranean when they have the urge to undress. “It’s quieter, there are no kids running around,” she said. “Your typical Spanish family’s not going.”
Natalia Casado, 35, a language student, said she had seen few people undressed in the city, though she had heard of the unclad subway rider. “Imagine with all the people there, how uncomfortable,” she said. “Not only the sights, but also the smells.”
Indeed, nudism’s few local proponents are themselves divided. Just Roca, 56, a specialist in sexology who participated in Mr. Tunick’s mass photo, quit Mr. Ribas’s association over “philosophical differences” about nudity and founded his own group called Aleteia, a rendering of the Greek word for truth. Nudist beaches and camps, common enough in Spain, he said, “are born of a culture that says being dressed is normal — I say nudity is the natural situation.”
Mr. Roca compares the campaign against nudity to a parallel proposal to ban the wearing of the Muslim women’s veil, often called the
burqa, in public places, as several nearby cities in the Catalonia region have done and as the Barcelona City Council is considering. Mr. Roca called both measures forms of segregation. “It’s like ‘No Negroes,’ ” he said. Just as politicians fear that a burqa-clad woman has something to hide, he said, “they imagine an undressed person has something to hide, too.”
Guy Reifenberg, 37, whose travel agency, Kokopeli, organizes adventure tours, said that the proposed sanctions were less a crackdown on nudity than a way to rein in the excesses of mass tourism, which is currently swamping Barcelona.
“The city’s afraid of the kind of tourists it’s attracting,” said Mr. Reifenberg, a native of Israel who has lived here for six years. These tourists, he said, go for “cheap alcohol, partying, hanging out in the street, and not spending money.” As a result, the city’s business community — hotels, restaurants, bars and retail outlets — has put pressure on the mayor, Jordi Hereu, a Socialist who faces an uphill battle for re-election in May.
The charming Old Town, with its famed Gothic Quarter, was the focus of the trouble, Mr. Reifenberg said. “In the Old Town, lately, there’s been a big rise in light drugs,” he said, pointing to banners hung from the balconies of picturesque buildings reading, “Out With Drunkards,” “Tourism = Cancer” and “Mayor Hereu: We Don’t Want Drugs or a Pigsty.”
On the charming triangular plaza named for
George Orwell, who lived here during the Spanish Civil War, stone steps once invited young tourists to sit, drink themselves drunk and make noise through the night. The steps were recently removed, and in March a large round children’s playground was opened, in an effort to deter unruly loitering.
Joaquim Mestre, 50, a member of the liberal Green Party who is the city councilor for civil rights, said that backers of the new sanctions hoped that they would give the police and courts a legal tool to control abusive behavior by tourists. His party opposes the sanctions, as it does the proposed burqa ban. Just as Barcelona’s undressed are only a handful, the number of women who wore the burqa in neighboring Lleida, the first city in Catalonia to ban it, “are about three,” he said.
As for nudity in Barcelona, Mr. Mestre said, go in summer to the affluent quarters of the city, north of the broad Avinguda Diagonal, which cuts it in two. “You will see affluent joggers every morning in the skimpiest of clothing,” he said. “Will the police pursue them?”
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