One of my favourite writers, Sally, champions the district of El Raval in Barcelona.

Sally at the Barcelo 360 Bar

‘…the district of sinners, crooks and toughs, a maggot hill, a cesspit and cavern, a den of criminals. It is fetishized, endowed with causal powers, apparently destroying all moral and physical life within it… a terrible centre for infection, the pestulant bottom of a sewer, with its smell of sin and affliction. Many of the area’s inhabitants mutated into a subhuman race. Everyone has funereal features, the look of having recently been in hospital, the appearance of death. They don’t eat. They nourish themselves with alcohol, morphine, ether, ‘coke’ and wine’

An Imagined Geography: Ideology, Urban Space, and Protest in the Creation of Barcelona’s ‘Chinatown’ by Chris Ealham, c.1835–1936 Read the rest of this article…

Sally at the Barcelo 360 Bar

“One of these days, the city of Barcelona will be but an entry in my memoirs. A mere peppercorn in the mill of my life as a whole, but what a glorious little peppercorn it is! Packed with punch, bite and heat. I shall sit in my rocking chair, cast my gaze over the misty English hills and remember a time when I was all over Barcelona like a flannel. I shan’t remember things exactly as they were, rather, I will compose a golden day drawn from all my favourite elements so very perfect that I will almost believe that it was true and tell anyone who will listen that once, I lived like a queen. Read the rest of this article…