That same day at the Arc de Triumph I noticed this statue of Pau Claris.

Before that moment Pau Claris was no more than the name of a street in Barcelona to me.
Pau is Paul in English but I don’t always remember that.
I liked the way he is standing here, as if dancing,  but still was no wiser about who he was.
So I looked him up when I got home and discovered  he was alive between 1586 and 1641 and was a lawyer and a clergyman and the 94th President of Catalunya.

He was in power  during a period of strife with the Spanish crown and in 1641 proclaimed the Catalan Republic under the protection of France. There is a strong possibility that he died from arsenic poisoning that same year.