Barcelona, October

Three districts of Barcelona, on foot, in one day

From the harbour at Drassanes up to the back of Montjuïc through three districts that do not share much except that the rents are still low enough to be interesting. A walk that takes six hours and nineteen kilometres if you do it right.

By Tomás Aragón Riba · · 16 min read

Barcelona has been written about so many times in the last twenty years that it now exists for visitors as a series of postcards: Sagrada Família, La Boqueria, the long beach at Barceloneta, the alleys of the Gothic Quarter. None of those places are bad. All of them are exhausted. They have been worn down by their own popularity into a kind of municipal sameness. You can stand inside any of them and feel that nobody around you, including yourself, is really here.

The walk I am about to describe goes nowhere near any of those places. It starts at the harbour, at the foot of the Mirador de Colón, and finishes six hours later at the upper edge of Montjuïc, where the city ends and the gardens begin. It passes through three districts — El Raval, Poble-sec, Sants — that are not on the postcard, and that have, in consequence, retained more of the texture of an actual city.

El Raval

I went up Rambla del Raval. It is the wide, palm-lined street that bisects the district from north to south, and it is unfashionable for reasons that have nothing to do with the street itself. The cafés at the southern end are run by Pakistani families who have been there for thirty years and who make better breakfast eggs than any of the brunch spots on the Eixample. I stopped for coffee at one of them. The owner did not look up. This was a relief.

The unfashionable parts of a fashionable city are where the city is still itself.

The Filmoteca de Catalunya, halfway up the Rambla, is the kind of cultural institution every European city wishes it had. The lobby is open during the day even if there is no screening. The bookshop is small but well-curated. I bought a copy of a book about Pasolini that I did not need, and the woman at the till asked me in Catalan whether I wanted a bag. I said no in Spanish, and she said something I did not understand in Catalan, and that was the end of it.

Poble-sec

Poble-sec begins where El Raval ends, separated by Paral·lel — the wide avenue that used to be the theatre district and is now mostly fast food and physiotherapy clinics. Poble-sec proper is the network of small streets that climb up the lower flanks of Montjuïc. The streets are too narrow for cars, the buildings are too short for shadows, and the cafés are still cheap in the way that Barcelona cafés stopped being cheap fifteen years ago.

A steep Barcelona street with palm trees and small shops, in soft late afternoon light.
Carrer Margarit, looking up. The shop at the bottom of the frame has been open since 1962. The shop above it has been open since the previous Saturday.

I had lunch on Carrer Blai, which is the famous tapas street and which is therefore considerably less interesting than the streets that run parallel to it. The trick is to walk Blai, look at what people are eating, and then walk one street up and order the same thing for half the price. I did this. It worked.

Sants

Sants is the district most people only know as "the place near the station". It is, in fact, an entire neighbourhood, with a long history of being industrial, then working-class, then forgotten, and now slowly noticed. The streets are wider than Poble-sec and the buildings are newer. The bakery at the corner of Carrer de Vallespir was the best thing I ate all day.

Sants is also where I stopped, after six hours and nineteen kilometres, in the small park at the top of Carrer de Sants, with the sun setting behind the mountain and a glass of water that the café owner brought me without being asked.

How to do this walk