Chicago’s lakefront rock carvings are unique in the world for their quantity and their extent along a modern shoreline. But the impulse to carve on rock is not unusual, from prehistoric to Roman times to now. The modern example closest to the Chicago carvings is on the Mediterranean shore in Barcelona, Spain.
Two decades ago, Sebastian Bugallo, an Argentine artist then managing a restaurant in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, decided the best way to recover from the night before was to go to the seaside at Barceloneta and carve rocks. His medium was mostly granite, specifically the large boulders piled topsy-turvy on the twin jetties at the middle of the kilometer-long beach.
Compered with Chicago’s limestone, granite is a hard rock to carve. But over five years starting in 2005, Bugallo made nearly 40 carvings on the southernmost of the two jetties near the Hospital del Mar, painting many of them.
The paint has weathered away, but the carvings survive in their magnificent profusion — portraits, devils, skulls, sea life, and a bathing beauty, among others. Plus, conveniently, a rock inscribed with an email address and the artist’s YouTube channel. Bugallo has returned to Argentina, but at his YouTube channel you can view his personal tour of the carvings (the two last videos on the YouTube page, in Spanish).
Read about Chicago’s lakefront carvings here or buy my book about the carvings, Lakefront Anonymous, online via Chicago’s Buddy shop.