Barcelona without the postcard: a week with the working city

I was in Barcelona the spring of 2017, the spring before the worst of the over-tourism arguments boiled over, and I remember a sentence the waiter at a small bar in El Born said while pouring me a vermouth: La ciutat ja no és nostra — the city isn’t ours anymore. He was forty-five. He was Catalan. He was tired.

I’ve thought about that sentence on every visit since. It’s true and it isn’t. The Barcelona that people queue up to see — the Sagrada Família, the Ramblas, Park Güell — has effectively been ceded to its visitors. But the rest of the city, the working ten kilometres of it, is still very much there, still cooking, still arguing, still living. You can have an honest week in Barcelona. You just have to want one.

Why I keep coming back

My first visit was in 2005, on the way somewhere else, and I stayed three weeks instead of three days. I learned more Spanish from the Sunday markets than from any class. The light comes in off the Mediterranean at an angle that flatters everything; the food is among the most quietly excellent in Europe; and the city has a Catalan habit of doing things properly that I happen to love — the long lunch, the late dinner, the proper vermut hour between 12:30 and 2.

Where to base yourself

Gràcia. Not the old town. Gràcia, north of the Eixample, was its own village until 1897 and still acts like one — narrow streets, small plaças where children play in the evening, neighbourhood bars where the owner remembers you on the second visit. This is where I stay now, almost always.

Sant Antoni if you want to be closer to the centre but not in it. The market hall is one of the best in the city, the streets around it have an unselfconscious mix of new bars and old shops, and you’re a fifteen-minute walk from everywhere.

Poblenou if you want the Mediterranean side. Formerly the city’s industrial belt, now half-gentrified, half-still-warehouses. The Rambla del Poblenou is the rare pedestrian street in Barcelona that isn’t currently being trampled.

Avoid: the Gothic Quarter as a base (too noisy, too touristed) and Barceloneta as a base (you’ll be a fifteen-minute Metro from everywhere).

What to actually do

Gaudí, yes, but only two. If you must choose between Sagrada Família, Park Güell, Casa Batlló, and the Casa Milà, choose the Sagrada Família (you really do have to, and a 9 a.m. timed entry with the tower included is non-negotiable) and the Casa Vicens in Gràcia — Gaudí’s first commission, far less crowded, weird and beautiful and very nineteenth century. Skip Park Güell unless you’re up at dawn and walking in through the back. The free hours in the morning are still genuinely free if you arrive before the gate opens.

Spend an afternoon at the MNAC. The National Art Museum of Catalonia, up the hill on Montjuïc, has the greatest collection of Romanesque frescoes anywhere — eleventh- and twelfth-century church paintings rescued from Pyrenean chapels and reinstalled in the museum’s vaulted rooms. The crowds are thin; the work is extraordinary. Walk down through the gardens afterwards.

Eat tapas where the staff don’t speak English first. This rules out most of the Gothic Quarter. Try Quimet i Quimet in Poble Sec — a standing-room-only sliver of a place where five generations of one family have been assembling cold preserved fish on bread for over a hundred years. Get the smoked salmon with yogurt and truffle honey. Drink the vermouth.

Take a train up the coast. A €4.40 R1 commuter line ticket gets you to Caldes d’Estrac or Sant Pol de Mar in just over an hour. Small towns, calm beaches, a fish restaurant that serves whatever came in this morning. The Barcelona beach is fine but it isn’t, properly, a beach.

Look up. The roofs of the Eixample are largely accessible and frequently astonishing — the rooftop of the Hotel Casa Fuster is one example, with a glass of vermouth and the city stretched out below you. The Casa Milà rooftop is famous; the Palau de la Música Catalana is, in my view, the more rewarding building if you can catch a midday tour.

Where to eat

A Catalan tapas bar is structurally different from a Madrid one. They lean on the sea, on the smoke of charcoal, on preserved foods, on the vermut.

Bar del Pla (Born) — The chef trained at El Bulli; the menu doesn’t show off about it. Tendrón of veal, an absurdly good potato omelette, a wine list of small Catalan producers.

Cal Pep (Born) — Counter only, walk-in only, queue up. The clams with ham, the tortilleta with whitebait. Some of these things have been on the bar for decades.

Bar Cañete (Raval) — The shellfish counter is the show, but the menu of the day is what keeps Catalans coming back.

Bodega 1900 (Sant Antoni) — Albert Adrià’s vermouth bar, the dignified contemporary cousin of the old Catalan bodegas. The spherified olive (yes, that one) is here.

Granja Petitbo (Eixample) — Coffee, a quiet morning room, a working-from-an-armchair sort of place. Good when you need to recover.

A Catalan habit worth adopting: the vermut hour, between roughly 12:30 and 2 on a Sunday, in which the city gathers on plaçes for a glass of fortified wine, olives, salted anchovies, and a slow conversation. El Xampanyet in El Born is the postcard version, Bar Calders in Sant Antoni the local one.

When to come

April–May and mid-September–October. The summer is now uncomfortably hot and the city, especially the historic centre, is overrun.

November and February are the genuine secrets. Cool, occasionally rainy, the restaurants quiet, the Catalans visible again.

August is the month locals leave; many neighbourhood places shut for two or three weeks. Confirm before you go.

Practical notes

• Visa: Schengen rules.
• Money: Card universally. Cash is useful in markets and the older bars.
• Transport: The Metro is efficient and a T-casual card (10 rides) is the right starter ticket. The buses run later than the Metro.
• Pickpockets: A real, professional, occasionally astonishing presence on La Rambla, the Metro line 3, and in Barceloneta. Front pocket, money belt, no phone on the café table.
• The Catalan thing: Catalonia has its own language and a complicated relationship with the rest of Spain. Use bon dia in the morning, gràcies when you leave a shop. You don’t have to take sides on independence to be polite.

A final thought

What I’ve come to love about Barcelona is that it is, despite everything that’s happened to it, still a city that can hold a long Sunday lunch in a plaça in Gràcia and not feel performative about it. The grandmothers are still drinking vermouth. The children are still kicking a ball. The waiter who told me, in 2017, that the city wasn’t theirs anymore: I went back to that bar last year. He was still there. The vermouth was still cold. He nodded at me when I sat down.

The city is not gone. The city is hanging on. So am I. So, I suspect, will you, if you give it three quiet days.