A cat big enough to become a neighbourhood

Botero's cat changes the scale of the route. The bronze animal dates from 1990 and has occupied Rambla del Raval since 2003. What matters here is not only its exaggerated anatomy but what happens when a sculpture becomes a habitual meeting point. The cat is long, low and absurdly substantial: people lean on it, photograph it and use it to orient themselves in the neighbourhood. Streetours should not pretend that a sculpture single-handedly defines the Raval, but its physical presence is unusually hard to ignore. Walk around it once. From some angles it is an artwork; from others it behaves almost like a piece of public infrastructure with whiskers.