Satan’s Coffee Corner, now in Barri Gòtic

I found my way to Barcelona about 8 years ago, with not much of a definite plan or a clear idea of how long I was planning on staying. I was in my early twenties at the time and the only thing I had a complete certainty for was photography. I found my way to IDEP where I ended up getting my bachelor degree and staying in this wonderful city for as long as I have.

I have developed a rather strange relationship with the Barcelona over the years, I love it and hate it and then love it again! But it has now become my home away from home.

A few years back I moved to Raval, where I now spend most of my days and it’s hands down one of my favourite areas of the city. In my daily routine I try to spread the local love and support my friends and small local businesses. I would start my day with coffee – it’s the one thing that never fails to get me out of bed. Read the rest of this article…

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…