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Definitely through this wide documentation, the retina can contemplate the mutations of a world that went from the water carriers of Santa Catalina to the modern water company from the Cecebre resevoir. From the clothing market in Campo de la Leña to the growth or the present shops in the big commercial areas. From the evocative overseas stores, with their foreign products, circular boxes of herrings or generous sheets of cod in the window, to the supermarkets with their merchandise in long lines on the stands. From the humble hydroplane perched like an immense metallic seagull in the Dársena to the constant air traffic of Alvedro. From the cart in times of Casa de la Troya to the distinctly blue aerodynamic Castromil along the Santiago motorway. From the boys in caps and long short pants, to those chaps with walk-man, skates and baseball caps. From the romantic and almost home made posters and sign makers to the explosion of today´s luminous posters, or that sad, alienating and vulgar inflation of those spray painted ones. A long, deep, historical and social change. As big as that between the long, pale faced, outdated ladies, and the prudish changing huts of Riazor, which gave the beach and air of a secular health resort to the vital and liberal top-less of today, the tireless sunbathing and the playful, festive pirouettes of the windsurfers. This book is a document. But it is also an artefact to understand our environment. To dream. To see the evolution all through an extraordinarily dynamic century, of a city, of a social and human network. Everything changes but everything stays the same. Heráclito was a right as Parménides. The city is the same –and so diverse! Flowing through time like a borgian river. It never stops producing the melancholic confirmation that everything past is irretrievable. To older people this book will bring a lot of happiness but also an echo of nostalgia. To the young, a world full of surprises and revealing discoveries and determinants of their perception of the city. Life has a bitter-sweet flavour. Nothing returns. Thanks only to the testament of these images, that set the retinas of time in memory, we recover times gone by. As long as memory exists, the past in some way endures. It will be saved. Perhaps many readers attracted by the unavoidably nostalgic effect of powerful fantasy that those images possess will tend to linger more on those that evoke the past and its fertile changes. The present is nearer to them. Although the book permits a more distanced view of the immediate present. In this way, perhaps they can appreciate the beauty, the proportion, the sense of order this town had and still conserves in some of the more privileged areas. So called progress is not always in a continuous line. Sometimes our ancestors created challenges which were difficult to overcome. What a great moment, that of the galleries. What architectural and urbanistic culture. And those moments of Ensanche, certain rationalists tics, certain inroads into the modernist movement, what civic wisdom they had.
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