No pandemic news in Tibidabo, the airiest place in Barcelona, which although it is only 500 meters above sea level has a street dedicated to none other than Edmund Hillary and another, on the corner, to Tenzing Norgay. The amusement park reopened on May 15, first with 30% of its maximum capacity allowed.
Now, given that this is not the Paseo del Born, given that in order to ride the attractions the children respect the sanitary regulations and since there has been no outbreak of covid among the workers since the venue reopened, the percentage, with the blessing of the health authorities, has risen to 50%. Those are just numbers. Zzzzz… You have to go to the details.In a city accustomed to measuring its heart rate based on the occupancy of its hotels, perhaps the most interesting thing then is to emphasize that Krüeger has been welcoming customers again this weekend.
The staff, that is, the monsters, wear masks. Approved and, at the same time, personalized, because Dracula, the undisputed epitome of contagion in fantasy literature, would make a laugh with a surgical mask and let alone with an FFP2 with an exhalation valve.
The park management, at the request of whether it would be possible to portray how the vampire, the girl possessed, the madman of the chainsaw or Frankenstein, characterized to be scary but also not to pass viruses, has said that no way, which has its logic, since the Hotel Krüeger has something of an initiation for teenagers.
Preserving the secret seems to be crucial. The little ones always visit the park with the doubt of when will be the day when they will dare to cross the lobby of this installation, one day, depending on how you look at it, very curious, because suddenly they enter a dominated place, so to speak. He speaks now, for the ‘boomer’ culture, that is, icons of terror that today’s children know little or nothing about and that, nevertheless, work.
Bruno Querol, at the helm of the park, explains that since May 15 there have been no scares to regret. The Tibidabo may be one more scientific confirmation that the virus, if it is outdoors and with its potential victims prudently at a distance from each other, fights with a chain of ribonucleic acid tied to its back .
From a bird’s eye view, in this sense, the pavement of Tibidabo is these days an immense tapestry of polka dots, where each spot indicates the place where to stand to preserve health. There are covered spaces, of course, like the Marionetarium, also reopened, but they are the fewest.
Queues are only sometimes the problem. They tend to compress. It happens in the pan, in the highways and even in those of the wakes, so how could the same thing not happen to get on an attraction. The people in charge of each installation try to put order, people who are generally very young and, according to Querol, very responsible. It seems that they are not part of the legion of young people that last weekend was infected in a chain in some discos in the metropolitan area. In any case, if there were to be a positive case, it is worth noting that yours is a very lonely job, with hardly any contact with the rest of the staff and practically very little with visitors.
With a capacity limit of 50%, the Tibidabo looked this weekend, despite the restrictions, cheerful, away from those bustles of weekends equivalent to this before 2020, but, still, vital, which is already a lot of. Above all, the top of the mountain, because there the visitors would hang out with that (sorry for the kitsch) multicolored snake of cyclists who came down the road at all hours, they would catch their breath at the viewpoint, next to the Ferris wheel, and little then they would get back on their bikes to face the descent.
In summary, and do not go yet that there is a tip, the Tibidabo seems to be one more of all those proofs of the nine that there are ways to reconcile leisure with the control of the virus. The tip has nothing to do with it. It’s just a suggestion. Visitors to the park often turn their backs on the temple that crowns the mountain. In one of its stained glass windows (first floor, as soon as you enter, on the right) the supposed apparition of the devil to Jesus is reproduced, in which the devil tempts him to give him everything he sees ( ‘haec omnia tibi dabo si cadens adoraveris me’) if he idolizes him and not God. It is a very interesting window, because what it offers you, and you can see it in the background, is nothing less than the entire urban property of Barcelona. You can even see the port, without cruise ships, true, but with its cable cars and everything. It is one more attraction that no one should miss.
