Secret About Barcelona Is Revealed : Olympics: Urban renewal spawned by the Games has brought the city into the 1990s, but regional culture remains.

Barcelona is a secret city, the Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said, a city of secret treasures that you discover in the streets.

Garcia Marquez lived there when he wrote “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” a novel about a dying dictator, during the twilight of the Generalisimo Francisco Franco’s rule in the 1970s.

Today, Franco’s autumn is a pallid memory in Spain’s summer of glory. And Barcelona, culminating a headlong rush of urban renewal for the Olympics, is secret no longer.

“The world ends after ‘92,” my friends and relatives in Barcelona have been telling me for the last year. They are making and spending money as never before. Their city has become one of the most expensive in Europe. It is a time of construction and chaos, Herculean work and Olympian partying.

“We have gone from the burro to the airplane,” my grandmother likes to say, sitting amid her memories in an old stone apartment building that survived bombardments during the Spanish Civil War.

Playing host to the Olympics gives any city a shot at membership in that haughty, vaguely defined club of “world cities.” London. Paris. Los Angeles.

This time around, the games also provide a stage for a region, a language and a people--the feisty, talented, sometimes exasperating Catalans.

After centuries of repression and resentment by their neighbors, the Olympics will crown Catalonia.

The symbolic site of the coronation is Montjuic, the mountain that overlooks Barcelona’s port. The crown is the Olympic “ring,” the multimillion-dollar sports and entertainment complex that makes Montjuic the center of the games.

I remember Montjuic from my childhood. My mother was born in Barcelona, where her family remained when she emigrated to the United States. We went back every year.

My grandfather, my Avi , Ramon Vives, was a dignified, quintessentially Catalan musician and composer. He conducted orchestras at summer music festivals on Montjuic. We called it “Avi’s mountain.” It had a band shell, a little amusement park and the pleasant, but stagnant, melancholy feel of Spain in the 1960s.

I wish my grandfather, who died nine years ago, could see Montjuic today. Like the city below, it has been transformed. It sparkles.

During the Olympic Games, the world will discover a city that has rediscovered itself. As I have learned during many wandering late nights, Barcelona’s urban culture represents the exact opposite of Los Angeles. You have to walk.

Extremes collide in spectacular streets: yuppies and thugs , Catalan and Spanish, sophistication and sleaze, transvestite prostitutes and aged Civil War veterans in berets, fast food restaurants and hallucinogenic, beautiful architecture, art and sports.

The cultural riches are fabled: Casals, Dali, Gaudi.

But Barcelona is also a serious sports town. The soccer and basketball teams are national powerhouses. The players are the best money can buy.

Diego Maradona, the fallen hero of international soccer, played there in his prime.

Barcelona fans are rabid. They support numerous all-sports publications. They cheer for the Dragons, a new U.S.-style football team. They consume TV and radio programs devoted entirely to the NBA.

Your average Spanish adolescent knows and cares a lot more about Magic Johnson than the late Generalisimo Franco.

Politics energizes the sports. I have yelled myself hoarse at soccer games next to my uncle, who inherited his season tickets from his father. Barca, as the team is known, is the 11-man army of Catalonia. Games in the 100,000-seat Camp Nou stadium are impressive nationalistic celebrations, festivals of flags and songs urging victory over the enemy--especially Madrid, the eternal rival.

Catalan and Catalonia have been major themes of the preparation for the Olympics. There has been inevitable conflict in balancing the elaborate, top-secret opening ceremony and other efforts to showcase the city, region and nation simultaneously.

The dynamics are further complicated because the nationally dominant Socialist party controls City Hall, thanks to a large working-class population of immigrants from elsewhere in Spain. Conservative Catalan nationalists run the regional government, or Generalitat.

Olympic organizers also are debating the role of Generalitat President Jordi Pujol: Should he be treated as a head of state or not? And they worry about Catalan extremists: Will they embarrass everyone by booing King Juan Carlos, as they have at past events?

Catalonian passions surprise visitors. They surprised me when I arrived in Barcelona to study Spanish in 1983 and learned it was not the preferred language at the family dinner table. Some Catalans seem more willing to speak English than Spanish. Language ignites verbal skirmishes everywhere.

This tension is the main remnant of conflict left from 40 years of dictatorship and the ferocity of the Spanish Civil War. The current generation generally does not dwell on the past.

But their elders remember. In 1936, my grandfather went off to fight in a regiment of leftist militiamen, ragtag partisans of the type George Orwell celebrated in “Homage to Catalonia.”

They made attacks into enemy territory on an armored train. There was a piano in one of the cars, and my grandfather passed the time playing it for the other soldiers. He wrote a composition on that train entitled “Inquietud, “ which means uneasiness or worry. The sheet music survived the war; much of the regiment did not.

My mother’s stories of her youth are filled with inquietud --armored caravans fleeing in panic through the streets, headed for the French border ahead of the victorious Fascists; the poverty of the gray postwar years; the repression of Catalan language and culture.

For my wife, who is from the Galicia region, the post-1975 transition to democracy brought the wheel full circle. At the newly bilingual University of Barcelona, she and other non-Catalans found that some required courses were offered only in Catalan, whether you spoke it or not.

The final victory: Catalan will join French, Spanish and English as an official language of the Olympics.

The common wisdom is that 1992--the Games, the Seville Expo, full membership in the European Community--represents a symbolic emergence of Spain, after longtime isolation and intolerance, as a full member of the community of democratic nations.

But reality has a way of outpacing analysis. Barcelona and other big cities are progressing quickly and impatiently. The idea of “transition” seems almost as distant as dictatorship.

Young Spaniards want to be known for more than bullfights, flamenco or Julio Iglesias. Theirs is the Spain of Almodovar films, of the exuberant rock music that is reaching Latin America and U.S. barrios; a democracy, combining tradition, progress and occasional excess.

When I was a child, Spain was a cheap vacation, and Spaniards saw the United States as a remote paradise of marvels. Today, my friends from Barcelona take extended American vacations, hitting the Grand Canyon, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego. But visiting my family overseas has become a daunting proposition.

“Tell people not to be surprised this summer when they find out a Coke will cost them $3 and hotels are $200 a night,” my friend Manel de Luna, a Barcelona journalist, told me on the phone.

With typical self-confidence, Manel reports that things are serene and moving smoothly toward the Games. I share his optimism, overall, though Basque terrorism remains a worrisome wild card.

In addition, the specter of gridlock is considerable. Barcelona is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. The historic center simply was not designed for the number of vehicles unleashed by prosperity and the accompanying obsession with driving.

There are too many cars at the best of times, not many hotels at this crucial time. Companies are sending people on early vacation to alleviate potential problems. Some of my relatives plan to escape to seaside summer apartments, realizing, as people realized in Los Angeles, that TV will be a fine way to experience the Olympics. So Barcelona will be crowded. It will be hot--July is infernal--and perhaps a little crazy.

Most of all, though, it will be triumphant. The Olympics will celebrate what Barcelona had well before the technology, resources and modernization of recent years: its people. And its streets.