The Rough Guide to Barcelona 8 (Rough Guide Travel Guides)

EL RAVAL

El Raval

he old-town area west of the Ramblas is known as

El Raval

(from the

Arabic word for “suburb”). Standing outside the medieval city walls, this

has always formed a world apart from the power and nobility of the

Barri Gòtic. In medieval times it was the site of hospitals, churches and

monasteries and, later, of noxious trades and industries that had no place in the

Gothic quarter. Many of the street names still tell the story, like c/de l’Hospital

or c/dels Tallers (named for the district’s slaughterhouses). By the twentieth

century the area south of c/de l’Hospital had acquired a reputation as the city’s

main red-light area, known to all (for obscure reasons) as the Barrio Chino, or

Barri Xinès

in Catalan – China Town.According to the Barcelona chronicler

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, in the days when the French writer Jean Genet

crawled its streets – an experience he recounted in his

Thief’s Journal

– the

district housed “theatrical homosexuals and anarcho-syndicalist, revolutionary

meeting places; women’s prisons . . . condom shops and brothels which smelled

of liquor and groins”. George Orwell later related how, after the 1936Workers’

Uprising,“in the streets were coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop

being prostitutes”. Even today in the backstreets between c/de Sant Pau and

c/Nou de la Rambla visitors may run the gauntlet of cat-calling prostitutes and

petty drug dealers, while a handful of atmospheric old bars – the

Bar Pastis

London Bar

Marsella

and

Almirall

– trade on their former reputations as

bohemian hangouts.

However, El Raval is changing rapidly.The 1992 Olympics and then European

Union funding achieved what Franco never could, and cleaned up large parts

of the neighbourhood almost overnight. North of c/de l’Hospital, in the “upper

Raval”, the main engine of change was the building of the contemporary art

museum,

MACBA

, and the adjacent culture centre, the

CCCB

, around which

entire city blocks were demolished, open spaces created and old buildings

cleaned

up.To

the south, in the “lower Raval” between c/de l’Hospital and c/de

Sant Pau, a new boulevard – the

Rambla de Raval

– has been gouged through

the former tenements and alleys, providing a huge new pedestrianized area.This

part of the Raval is also home to the neighbourhood’s two other outstanding

buildings, namely Gaudí’s

Palau Güell

and the church of

Sant Pau del

Camp

, one of the city’s oldest churches.

The local character of El Raval is changing perceptibly, too, with the years.

The area’s older, traditional residents are gradually being supplanted by a

younger, more affluent and arty population, especially following the opening of

new university faculty buildings near MACBA.There’s also a growing influx of

immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and North Africa, so alongside the

surviving spit-and-sawdust bars you’ll find new restaurants, galleries and

boutiques, not to mention a burgeoning number of specialist grocery stores,