Ten days after Pope Leo XIV told the city to lift its eyes, the sky over the Gothic Quarter rained 100,000 verses where bombs once fell.
On the evening of June 20, a helicopter appeared over the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona and dropped 100,000 poems. Crowds gathered in the Plaça Nova, arms raised, catching bookmarks printed with verses about freedom as they floated down over some of the ground most devastated by bombing during the Civil War. The event marked 50 years of Spanish democracy. Not a single poem reached the ground — every one was caught by hands reaching upward, or came to rest in the trees.
The timing, 10 days after Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Barcelona, was hard to miss.
The motto the Spanish bishops had chosen for Leo’s June 6-12 tour was Alzad la mirada — Lift up your eyes — drawn from John 4:35, where Christ tells the disciples to look up and see a harvest already ripe in the field. Leo carried the theme through six days and four cities, from the consecration of the Tower of Jesus Christ at the Sagrada Família to the migrant reception centers of Tenerife. Closing his visit, he said: “Let us learn from Jesus to look at our neighbor, at people, and at the world through God’s eyes — with love, respect, and compassion.”
The poetry drop was conceived by Casagrande, a Chilean collective that has been bombing cities with poetry since the early 2000s — Santiago, Dubrovnik, Guernica, Warsaw, Berlin, London, Rotterdam. The premise is simple: cities that were bombed from the air deserve to have their sky returned to them. Barcelona was the 10th city in the series. The Gothic Quarter was chosen deliberately — it was one of the areas most savaged in March 1938. Eighty-eight years later, 100,000 bookmarks printed with poems in Catalan and Spanish, written by 50 Catalan poets and 50 Chilean ones, floated down from the same altitude, on the theme of liberty.
What comes from the sky
Here's what he said:
Aircraft should always be vehicles of peace, never of war! No one should fear that threats of death and destruction will come from the sky.
After the tragic experiences of the 20th century, aerial bombardment should have been banished forever! Instead, as we know, it still exists, and technological development, which is positive in itself, is being put at the service of war. This is not progress, it is regression!
Dear friends, in this context, it becomes even more important to chart courses of peace in the skies ...
The parallel with Leo’s visit was not lost on those present. Just days earlier, the same city had watched a drone spectacle form Gaudí’s face above the Sagrada Família spires, and a pope had blessed the tallest church in the world while asking a crowd to tilt their heads back and look. Now, on the eve of World Refugee Day, the sky over the old city was once again the protagonist — this time scattering verses rather than drones, poems rather than a papal blessing, but answering the same gesture: arms raised, faces upward, receiving what the air brought down.
The Gospel logic is not hard to find. Alzad la mirada is a promise about what you might find when you lift up your eyes. The people of Barcelona who gathered on Saturday evening were not expecting poetry from above. They reached up anyway — and caught it.
