Glimpses at Corona: La Boqueria and Notre Dame
The setting is the crowded Mercat de la Boqueria in Barcelona, Spain. It is by reputation one of the world’s best fresh food markets. The history of the market goes back to the 13th century when street vendors, peasants, and nearby farmers would come to s
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The setting is the crowded Mercat de la Boqueria in Barcelona, Spain. It is by reputation one of the world’s best fresh food markets (Figure 1). The history of the market goes back to the 13th century when street vendors, peasants, and nearby farmers would come to sell their wares from makeshift, open-air stalls in the city’s center. The name is believed to derive from the language of the region. In Catalan, boc means “goat”, so that a boqueria would be a place where goat meat is sold. The many shoppers and tourists who walk into La Boqueria are immersed in a world of delicate scents, vibrant colors, and rich flavors. In the central part of the market, they’ll find the rich seafood displays, and toward the back many of the butcher and delicatessen shops, offering aromatic meats, hams and sausages. Completing this mosaic are the displays of the scores of fruit vendors—each in just a few available square meters—with varieties of apples, pears, peaches, plums, apricots, cherries, grapes, and oranges. In competition with each other, they vie for the attention of locals and tourists who press ahead from stall to stall. One of several merchants sells Valencia oranges. His fruit is large, round, polished, and beautiful. Arranged in a large pyramid, they glow rich in color and light. A sign proclaims them to be “extra dulce” and a larger sign announces that they cost 0.99 euros per kilogram. See Figure 2. An excited boy reaches to pull an orange from the bottom of the stack . . . his mother, recognizing an impending disaster, stops him just in time. The boy’s interest in the oranges now turns to the question: “how many oranges are there in this pile, mama?” Mama shrugs, but tells him that this is a question for his older sister. The older sister, a mathematics student at the Universitat de Barcelona, reflects: “hmm, how many oranges might there be? Can their number be estimated?” After some back and forth with her brother, she assumes that the pyramid consists of oranges through and through and that there is no inner structure of wood or
A. J. Hahn Department of Mathematics, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Wonders (ed.) Math in the Time of Corona, Mathematics Online First Collections, https://doi.org/10.1007/16618_2020_25
A. J. Hahn
Fig. 1 Tourists and natives busily shopping on September 13, 2009 at the La Boqueria market in Barcelona. Image credit and permission from FeaturePics
Fig. 2 A carefully arranged display of oranges at the La Boqueria market. Many thanks to the enthusiastic, fun-loving world traveler Alexandra Kovacova for posting this image on her informative and richly illustrated website https://www.crazysexyfuntraveler.com/la-boqueria-market-inbarcelona/ and for permitting its use in this article
Glimpses at Corona: La Boqueria and Notre Dame
cardboard that supports the display. She regards the oranges at the very top of the stack to be rearranged in two horizontal layers, counts the oran
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