COLUMN ONE : Barcelona Blossoms for Games : Once the first city of Spain, it has been upstaged by Madrid. Its 1992 Olympic splurge is aimed at reasserting its claim as a grand metropolis of Europe.

BARCELONA, Spain —  Teen-age vandals sometimes strike in the pre-dawn quiet of the Barcelona suburbs, hunting down cars with Madrid license plates, twisting the side-view mirrors all the way around until the devices hang limp and useless.

Most people of Barcelona are too urbane and self-confident to condone such churlish antics. But, in truth, they harbor the same resentments.

Madrid was once dismissed by Barcelona as a dour, cold and colorless place of pettifogging bureaucrats and heavy-laden soldiers. But, in recent years, Barcelona has watched Madrid pass it by.

That is kind of infuriating, and Barceloneses look on the heyday of the Madrilenos with the same mixture of disbelief and cynicism and suppressed rage that afflicts the citizens of Montreal, St. Petersburg and San Francisco whenever they contemplate the new power and glory of greedy, uncouth giants such as Toronto, Moscow and Los Angeles.

Nowadays, however, a happy thought often shakes Barcelona out of this dejection: The 1992 Summer Olympics are rushing near.

For Barcelona, the Olympics represent a special moment, a golden chance to upstage the upstart. Most Barceloneses believe that their wondrous Mediterranean port of sophisticated style and beauty will soon reassert itself as a grand city of Europe and push the thriving Spanish capital of Madrid back into the shadows, back where it belongs, at least for a summer, perhaps much longer.

A Barcelones knows that he is different from a Madrileno. “I like Madrid very much,” says Pedro Palacios, the Olympic press chief who worked in the capital as a journalist for several years. “It has great vitality. But people here are more serious, more reliable. When I say I’m going to meet you for lunch at 2 o’clock, oh, I might be caught in traffic and come 10 minutes later, but I’ll be there. In Madrid, people say 2 o’clock and show up at 3.

”. . . And their lunches are incredible. In Madrid, they start at 3 or later and eat until 5:30 or later. And, when they get back to the office, they still need an aperitif at 7.”

The Spanish novelist Eduardo Mendoza wrote a bestseller about Barcelona five years ago entitled “City of Marvels.” Hordes of visitors will have their chance to find out what he meant when they show up in 1992.

Like all truly great cities, Barcelona is a paradise for walkers, a city of secret smiles and surprises. Many tourists who come to Barcelona know all about Antoni Gaudi, the acclaimed Catalan architect, and eagerly sign up for buses that take them to the still-unfinished Church of La Sagrada Familia and the Guell Park and La Pedrera to gawk and gasp in wonder at the wild and colorful manifestations of an intense imagination.

For most of the world, Gaudi has always seemed a strange and isolated genius who sprouted out of nowhere and created an architectural world of his own. But this notion misses the spirit of Barcelona.

Gaudi was really one of a bunch at the turn of the century, a light of modernismo-- the Barcelona strand of the Art Nouveau movement that excited the cultural centers of Europe from the 1890s until World War I. Modernismo does not exist in Madrid. The cultural currents of London and Paris and Vienna reached the heart of Barcelona but left Madrid alone.

Few cities anywhere have a pedestrian walkway to compare with the “Rambles,” a 400-year-old street built on the dry bed of an ancient river. Crowds amble on the Rambles for its 10-block length from the Plaza de Catalunya in the center of the city to the Columbus monument near the seafront.

A walk is a continual adventure. Vendors hawk flowers, birds, rabbits and myriad handicrafts. Con men try to entice passersby into shell games. Clowns and mimes and flamenco dancers perform and pass the hat. Photographers with old-fashioned box cameras snap portraits for a few hundred pesetas. Great, gaudy newsstands sell books, magazines, soccer posters, postcards, maps, calendars, T-shirts and key rings.

In the dying days of the Francisco Franco dictatorship, these news vendors, thumbing their noses at the Establishment, used to sell anarchist tracts as well. Now they sell pornography instead.

The twists and turns of the Gothic Quarter, the oldest neighborhood of Barcelona, are so narrow that a walker finds flocks of laundry flapping overhead on rope that hangs from one building across the street to another. Some aging buildings on either side of a street lean on iron bars spanning the street for support. Old men gather on Friday nights in old restaurants to talk of literature and politics, as they have for centuries. Admirers of Pablo Picasso can still dine at his old hangout, Els Quatre Gats, and stroll on seedy Avignon Street.

Most people think that Picasso’s first famous painting, “The Women of Avignon,” was named after the papal city of France, but Barceloneses know that the young Picasso had the whores of Barcelona’s Avignon Street in mind.

Barcelona was once the first city of Spain. As far back as the 17th Century, Don Quixote had no doubts about this. The Knight of La Mancha, in the words of Miguel de Cervantes, praised Barcelona as a “storehouse of courtesy, haven of wayfarers, fatherland of the brave, avenger of the wronged, home of loyal friendships freely bestowed and, moreover, in point of beauty and situation, a city without peer.”

Madrid’s present population of 3.1 million is almost twice that of Barcelona, a city of 1.7 million. But in the earlier decades of this century, Barcelona was larger, and the world looked on it as the real metropolis of Spain.

Barcelona, not Madrid, hosted the World’s Fairs of 1888 and 1929. Picasso and Joan Miro honed their art in Barcelona, not Madrid. When opponents of Adolf Hitler wanted to protest the award of the 1936 Olympics to Berlin, it seemed natural to look to Barcelona to stage a rival People’s Olympics. During the Franco dictatorship, Europeans knew that Barcelona was the Spanish center of opposition and democratic yearnings.

Mayor Pascual Maragall mused about the age and roles of Madrid and his city during a recent interview in his office in the city hall that overlooks Plaza Sant Jaume in the Gothic Quarter.

“Barcelona is a 2,000-year-old town that has seen everything,” Maragall said in English, “while Madrid is a much younger town. In that sense, they are very different. . . .

“During the dictatorship,” he went on philosophically, “Barcelona was the reference point of democracy. Not being the capital of the dictatorship, it was the free zone within the dictatorship--at least it was freer than Madrid. Now democracy has meant the revival of Madrid as the capital of a democratic country. Barcelona is no longer a special free zone all by itself.”

A soft-spoken man with a brush mustache and the air of a rumpled intellectual, Maragall, who holds a doctorate in economics, studied for his master’s degree at the New School for Social Research in New York and lectured for one semester in 1978 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Despite the new heyday of Madrid, Maragall still regards Barcelona as the more European city. On the other hand, Madrid, according to the mayor, is a city under American influence. He does not mean that as a compliment.

“The Americans came into Spain by way of a treaty with Franco,” the mayor said. “It was not a very democratic entry. After the American government signed their military treaty with Franco and Dwight Eisenhower embraced Franco, American businessmen found it natural to set up their companies in Franco’s capital.”

In the last decade, there has been a renaissance of Catalan nationalism and the Catalan language, and most Barceloneses regard themselves as Catalans, not Spaniards. Could Barcelona end up like Montreal, a cosmopolitan city that has lost its status as the metropolis of all Canada to reign as no more than the regional center of Quebec?

“Oh, no, I don’t think Barcelona will fall into that trap,” Maragall said.

Barcelona would probably not have won selection as the site of the Olympic Games were it not for a harrowing event in Madrid more than a decade before.

At 6:23 in the late afternoon of Feb. 23, 1981, Lt. Col. Manuel Tejero, a pistol-brandishing fascist with a mop of black mustache and the peculiar, sawed-off hat of the Spanish Guardia Civil, marched into the chamber of the Cortes, or Parliament, in Madrid with 20 of his armed men in a coup attempt that shocked all Spain.

Most Spaniards now look on the Tejero adventure as a moment of comic opera. But there was great trembling and turmoil in Spain then. Reports spread of army units on the move to support the uprising. The dictator Franco had died only six years before, and many Spaniards, in their darkest dreams, doubted that the military would ever allow the fragile transition from tyranny to democracy. Now the nightmare had come alive.

But Tejero never succeeded. King Juan Carlos I, donning his military uniform, took to television to call on troops to spurn the conspirators and defend the democratic constitution. The troops obeyed, and the coup aborted. The conspirators surrendered and ended their military careers in prison. Democracy was safe.

In the wake of the abortive coup, many Spanish leaders started to search for projects and programs that might serve to unify the country and demonstrate that Spain had faith in its future. Narcis Serra, the Socialist mayor of Barcelona, decided that the time was ripe for an idea that had been brewing for a while.

Barcelona businessman Juan Antonio Samaranch was the catalyst. Soon after his election as president of the International Olympic Committee on the eve of the Olympics in Moscow in 1980, Samaranch had suggested to Serra that their hometown ought to make a bid.

Madrid was caught in too much turmoil and confusion right after the coup to think up ways of challenging Barcelona. Maragall succeeded Serra (now the deputy prime minister of Spain) as mayor and made Olympic wooing a major pastime. By the time Maragall led the Barcelona team to the Beaulieu Palace in Lausanne, Switzerland, for the final appeal to the International Olympic Committee, most journalists looked on the city as a clear favorite.

With both Catalonia President Jordi Pujol and Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez alongside, Maragall, speaking in French, told the committee that Barcelona had already started construction of the Olympic sites and added: “Barcelona does not need these Games to feel itself fulfilled. But if you give us this vote of confidence, you will contribute a good deal to helping us carve our role in the world.”

The arguments proved persuasive. In the final vote Oct. 17, 1986, Barcelona defeated Paris, 37 to 20. A beaming Samaranch came out of the closed meeting to call out to the press: “Barcelona!”

These are tense days for drivers in Barcelona. Familiar routes close every few weeks, traffic signs pointing the way to narrower, slower streets. It sometimes takes half an hour to creep around a maze of barriers to get to a house only a few blocks away.

Parking grows ever more hopeless. Massive earthmovers churn dust into the air, choking the lungs and stinging the eyes of those driving past a host of construction sites.

Drivers grumble about this, but none are surprised or terribly perturbed. Barcelona is preparing for the Olympics and undergoing what is probably the greatest peacetime transformation of a city in Europe since Baron Georges Haussmann cut his boulevards through the jumble of Paris in the 19th Century.

The Olympics, in a sense, are only the excuse. Barcelona had been neglected in the Franco era by a dictator who despised it as a hotbed of leftist and Catalan obsessions. The airport, for example, a responsibility of the central government, was long in disrepair. “If the Olympic Games did not exist,” Serra has said, “it would be necessary for us to invent them.”

The Olympics have enabled Barcelona to draw enough funds from government and private sources to mount its program of extraordinary public works. Contracts have lured such renowned architects and designers as American Richard Meier, Englishman Norman Foster, Italian Gae Aulenti, Japanese Arata Isozaki and Catalan Ricard Bofill.

For the Olympic events themselves, Barcelona has gutted a stadium constructed for the 1929 World’s Fair on Montjuich and, while keeping the old facade, rebuilt it into the official Olympic Stadium seating 70,000; constructed a new, Isozaki-designed Sant Jordi Palace for gymnastics and other indoor events; set down several new pools throughout the city, and even laid out a field for the new Olympic sport of baseball.

To improve the infrastructure of the city, Barcelona is building a Foster-designed communications tower taller than those of Seattle and London; completing the inner beltway of the city with tunnels and new roadways; revamping the airport; constructing a dozen new hotels; beautifying boulevards and plazas, and restoring the old train station.

On top of this, to improve its cultural life, the city is putting up a Bofill-designed National Theater and a Meier-designed Museum of Contemporary Art and reopening the Catalonia Museum of Art on Montjuich in a new Aulenti interior to display what is probably the world’s most astounding collection of Romanesque art. And as lovely embellishment throughout the city, officials have commissioned monumental outdoor sculptures by artists such as Eduardo Chillida, Richard Serra, Antoni Tapies, Fernando Botero, Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein.

But the real prize of 1992 Barcelona will be the Olympic Village. Needing to house 15,000 athletes for the Games, Barcelona decided to build a new neighborhood of apartment houses, hotels and office towers that would serve the needs of the city for many decades afterward. The neighborhood will also help Barcelona, as many residents put it, “recover the sea.”

Like the peoples of many ports, Barceloneses long ago turned their backs on the sea. Railroad lines and ugly factories hugged the coastline and made it impractical for residents of the city to spend much time alongside the Mediterranean. The Olympic Village is changing all that.

As soon as the Olympic Games end, Barcelona will have a new neighborhood right on the beach of the Mediterranean but not far from the center of town. “Long after the Olympic Games are forgotten,” says Pedro Palacios, “Barcelona will remember the year 1992 because of the construction of the Olympic Village.”

Extreme Catalan nationalists are selling T-shirts and badges these days that show a Barcelones pulling his empty pockets inside out under the logo “Barcelona ‘93” while the Olympic rings waft away like puffs of smoke.

On top of branding the Olympics a waste of money, these nationalists also insist that the Games will redound to the glory of Spain rather than Catalonia.

“It is foolish on their part,” says Prof. Miquel de Moragas, director of Olympic research for the Autonomous University of Barcelona. “Catalonia and the cause of Catalonia and the Catalan language will receive worldwide notice.” For the first time, for example, Catalan--spoken by 6 million people in Spain--will be recognized as an official Olympic language alongside Spanish, French and English.

But a major nationalist problem does loom over the Olympics. Basque separatist terrorists intend to disrupt the Games.

Bloody Basque separatism has nothing to do with Catalan nationalism, but the separatist organization ETA--which takes its name from the words Basque Homeland and Freedom in the Basque language--clearly wants to carry its terror to Catalonia to embarrass the Spanish government during the Olympics and force it to make concessions.

The Spanish government, promising increased security for the Games, insists that it has the means to deal with ETA.

It may be many years before anyone can assess whether the costly Olympic splurge has been worthwhile. Much depends, of course, on whether Barcelona really does become a great regional city in a future Europe that is united and devoid of trade barriers.

Although it is difficult to assess the future, no one can doubt the self-confidence of Barcelona in meeting post-1992 Europe.

The city, in fact, is a little like the 1992 Olympic mascot, Cobi. When the Barcelona Olympic Committee picked the creation of cartoonist and designer Javier Mariscal in 1988, there were notable groans.

Cobi, a dog who looks straight ahead and sideways at the same time like a Picasso portrait, doesn’t resemble any other Olympic mascot in the past. But Cobi has grown on everyone in Barcelona. He is perky and trendy and open and sure of himself. It is hard now to imagine any other mascot fitting the mood of the new Barcelona.