St-Lazare student shocked by terror attack in Barcelona
Jasmine Vega returned home to Canada from the best summer of her life the day before a van drove into a crowd on Las Ramblas, a popular pedestrian boulevard in Barcelona, killing 13 and injuring about 100.
“It’s the hot spot. Everybody goes there,” said Vega, a 20-yearold John Abbott College student who spends summers in Barcelona, where her parents lived before moving to Canada about 20 years ago.
Little did the St-Lazare resident dream when she arrived in Montreal on Wednesday that, less than 24 hours later, the shopping street where her grandmother buys groceries three or four times a week would be the scene of unimaginable carnage.
“It’s beautiful. The locals go. The tourists go,” said Vega, who in previous summers walked past the site of the terror attack to daily language classes.
This summer, instead of studying, she worked at a yacht club 20 minutes up the coast but spent days off with her grandmother in Barcelona.
“It was the best experience of my life,” Vega said.
She learned of Thursday’s attack from relatives in Spain.
“I was talking with my aunt and all of a sudden she said, ‘We’re all OK. There’s an attempt in Catalonia, but we’re all OK.’ ”
As family and friends shared graphic videos of the carnage on Facebook, Vega was in shock.
“I was stunned. I couldn’t believe it,” she said.
“It’s hard to believe because Spain is such a welcoming place. Everyone in Catalonia is very welcoming and very open, and to think that something would happen like that is very hurtful,” she said.
Vega, whose family runs a Spanish tapas restaurant and boutique in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, said the attack would not deter her from returning there next summer.
“The city I fell in love with three years ago and said I’m going to come every summer, unfortunately it happened there, but it could happen anywhere,” she said.
“Regardless, it’s the most beautiful city I’ve ever been to. I fell in love with everything, and I don’t have second thoughts on going back.”