Painted Pigeons, Pushy Parrots

Barcelona's the sort of city where you're never surprised at anything you see. But even here, tourists are constantly taken aback by the pigeons in the parks. Most Barcelona pigeons are the normal, pigeon-toed, cigarette butt-pecking critters you'd see anywhere, but quite a few come with splashes of gaudy colours—purple, orange, green, even pink, as if they were permanently dressed up for some Modernista pigeon carnival.

Seen up close, they don't seem to be painted; the colours are on individual feathers or sets of feathers. But after considerable bother and research we can confirm that yes, painted they are. Barcelona's fanatical pigeon-keepers are legends in the pigeon world, and they decorate their birds carefully for identification, like branding cattle.

Look up in the Barcelona skies, or into the fronds of its palm trees, and chances are you'll also spot some bright green parrots, in fact lots of parrots. Invasive 'Quaker parrots' (or 'monk parakeets') are colonizing cities all over the world, but Barcelona has far more than its share. First established in the 1970's, the predictable result of a brief fad for parrot pets, the birds are now everywhere.