The 1960s

The 1960s matter in the narrator’s account less as a precisely dated period than as an atmosphere glimpsed through childhood: sexual freedom, youthful audacity, and the sense that life might be a celebration. In Cadaqués, those ideals lingered in a summer community whose later transformations made the decade feel at once formative and irretrievably distant.

The Decade as an Afterimage

The narrator describes seeing the last traces of the 1960s through the narrow opening of childhood. What reached her was a set of possibilities—freedom, pleasure, and power for the young—rather than a complete account of the decade itself. Its influence remains visible in how she remembers the people around her and in the conviction that an early glimpse of another way of living leaves a lasting mark.

That memory is also consciously imperfect. The narrator reflects that people can possess lost paradises in which they were never actually present. The 1960s therefore persists as both lived inheritance and imagined elsewhere: a past encountered at its edges, then enlarged by longing.

Cadaqués and the Summer Community

The apartments above the narrator’s family home, built in the early 1970s with white-painted concrete, reddish wooden stairs, long corridors, and broad windows overlooking the village and bay, became a seasonal gathering place. During her childhood they housed a loose international community of hippies. At night, she went to sleep hearing their music, laughter, and shouts; when summer ended, the residents returned to the Netherlands, the United States, or Germany.

The community changed as its generations aged. The hippies grew old, and by the 1990s the apartments had filled with fashionable, respectable, wealthy residents. That shift gives the remembered place a visible chronology: the unconventional summer world did not simply vanish from memory, but was replaced in the same buildings by a different social character. For the narrator, having glimpsed the earlier spirit helps explain why she and others were not left untouched by its appetite for freedom and fun.

Childhood, Family, and Inherited Values

The decade’s cultural afterimage sits within a much longer family history in Cadaqués. From the terrace, the narrator recalls a house where generations of everyday life accumulated: her grandfather arriving with crates of fruit from Barcelona, laundry being taken away to wash, and Pepita de la Galiota bringing large custards. Toasted bread and butter, beach towels drying on the railing, reluctant siestas, trips into the village, afternoon ice creams, and target shooting form part of the same remembered world.

As the narrator grew older, that setting also held first drunken nights, loves, dawns, friendships, and experiences with drugs. Later came her first child, trips to Cadaqués with the children, separations, and her mother’s old age. The daily pattern of breakfasts, boat outings, lunches, naps, and card games could remain almost unchanged even as happiness altered and the house itself aged alongside its owner. The scene makes cultural memory inseparable from domestic routine: a historical atmosphere is recalled through the repeated life of one family home.

A Changing Past

The family house gathers memories from across the narrator’s life rather than preserving one fixed, idyllic summer. She remembers the mother’s room as the largest and best placed in the house, once a vantage point from which her mother gave the day’s instructions or joined conversations on the terrace. In the present of the recollection, no one occupies it; the narrator cannot bring herself to enter. The house has grown old with her mother and, in the narrator’s perception, has finally become an extension of her.

That transformation complicates the apparent permanence of the Cadaqués landscape. Morning light and the calm, bright sea can make life seem to be beginning again, much as it did when the narrator was twenty, but the view does not undo what time has changed. The remembered 1960s spirit belongs to this same tension: its promise survives in places and habits, while the people and forms of life that carried it pass into memory.