Category Archives: Barcelona

Museum celebrates Barcelona’s disappearing Gypsy heritage

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Artefacts reflect joys and sorrows of a community persecuted in Spain since Catholic reconquest in 1492

It doesn’t look like a place of legend, but the narrow Carrer de la Cera is the birthplace of la rumba catalana, the infectiously rhythmic stepchild of flamenco created by Barcelona’s Gypsy community in the 1950s and popular today throughout the world.

Now the city’s gitanos have their own museum, a tiny, vibrant space on the Carrer de la Cera, which lies in the multicultural el Raval neighbourhood. The museum will open its doors on Sunday.

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‘Perfect harmony’: Lionel Messi seals PSG move as he signs two-year contract

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  • Deal worth about €35m a year net and has option to extend
  • ‘I can’t wait to set foot on the Parc des Princes pitch’

Lionel Messi will be presented as a Paris Saint-Germain player on Wednesday after signing a two-year contract. The deal includes an option to extend by a year and gives the forward a net salary of about €35m (£29.6m) with bonuses factored in.

Related: The little devil who became a deity: Messi exit leaves a void like no other

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‘We can’t go back’: the Russian gay family who took refuge in Spain

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Family was targeted in hate campaign on social media after appearing in a food chain’s ad

A Russian lesbian family who received death threats after they appeared in an advertisement for the food chain VkusVill say they feel safe in Barcelona and accepted for who they are.

The family were targeted in a hate campaign on social media after they appeared in the ad. The company later apologised and replaced the photo with one of a heterosexual family.

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Russian gay family in controversial ad flee to Spain after threats

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Lesbian couple faced hate campaign after supermarket chain VkusVill called the promotion ‘a mistake’

A lesbian couple and their family, who were featured in an advert for a Russian supermarket chain that led to a national scandal have fled the country after facing online abuse and death threats.

Mother Yuma, daughters Mila and Alina, and Alina’s girlfriend Ksyusha have said they were forced to leave Russia for Spain after they featured in an ad in which they said they enjoyed VkusVill’s onigiri rice balls and hummus.

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Lionel Messi leaving Barcelona after ‘obstacles’ thwart contract renewal

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  • Messi has spent whole career at Spanish club and is free agent
  • Barcelona say La Liga regulations made new deal impossible

Barcelona have announced that Lionel Messi is leaving the club after “financial and structural obstacles” made it impossible to renew his contract. The forward, who has spent his whole career there, had been expected to re-sign after his deal expired in June.

“Despite FC Barcelona and Lionel Messi having reached an agreement and the clear intention of both parties to sign a new contract today, this cannot happen because of financial and structural obstacles (Spanish Liga regulations),” the club said.

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Environmental impact of bottled water ‘up to 3,500 times greater than tap water’

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Researchers also find impact of bottled water on ecosystems is 1,400 times higher than that of tap water

The impact of bottled water on natural resources is 3,500 times higher than for tap water, scientists have found.

The research is the first of its kind and examined the impact of bottled water in Barcelona, where it is becoming increasingly popular despite improvements to the quality of tap water in recent years.

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Barcelona cannabis clubs face closure in new legal setback

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Police and city authorities agree that ‘pioneering’ model has reduced street dealing and consumption

Barcelona’s 200 cannabis clubs face closure after the supreme court shut a legal loophole that has seen the city become Spain’s marijuana capital.

It is the latest in a series of setbacks for the asociaciónes, as they are popularly known. In 2017, the court overruled a law passed by the Catalan parliament which said “private consumption of cannabis by adults … is part of the exercise of the fundamental right to free personal development and freedom of conscience”.

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Departures at high-profile Barcelona museum provoke anger in art world

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Hundreds sign petition after the jobs of Tanya Barson and Pablo Martínez, two senior figures at Macba, are axed

A row has broken out in the international art world over the departures of Tanya Barson, the English curator, and Pablo Martínez, the head of programmes, from the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (Macba).

The pair departed on 16 July, the day after Elvira Dyangani Ose, the director of the Showroom in London, was appointed as the museum’s new director.

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‘Iconic gay image’: history of sailors and sex explored in Barcelona exhibition

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Catalan city is hosting new show looking at relationships between men who spend their lives at sea

A new exhibition at the Maritime Museum of Barcelona seeks to tell the story of the romantic and sexual reality of men who spend their lives at sea.

El desig és tan fluid com la mar (Desire Flows Like the Sea) aims to evoke the lives of men living in isolation but at close quarters and whose intimate lives were once clandestine out of necessity because homosexuality was and, and in many places still is, considered both a sin and a capital offence.

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App maps shady spots to guide Barcelona walkers along cooler routes

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Cool Walks aims to help pedestrians avoid dangerous heat and find public drinking fountains

A new app promises to help Barcelona residents find the shadiest route between two places to avoid extreme heat.

Cool Walks, a routing tool for pedestrians first developed at a data visualisation contest, aims to show users a variety of walking routes to take for their intended destinations.

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Barcelona street sellers take on Nike with own-brand trainers

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Ethical streetwear co-operative Top Manta says profits will help migrant vendors ‘become legal and work for a decent wage’

After years of selling cheap copies of designer shoes and handbags, Barcelona’s street vendors have set up a co-operative and launched a line of trainers under the brand name Top Manta.

Unlike an earlier attempt to establish a brand in 2017 by sticking a logo on shoes imported from China, the trainers are made in Alicante in Spain and Porto in Portugal.

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Calls for Keith Haring mural to stay at Barcelona site being turned into care home

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Artwork in building slated for demolition faces uncertain future, though city has pledged to save it

It all began one February night in 1989. Cesar de Melero was DJing in the Ars Studio club in Barcelona when someone told him that the artist Keith Haring was outside but the doorman wouldn’t let him in.

“The place was packed, so I put on a record and pushed through the crowd,” De Melero told the Guardian. “And there he was with his saintly, innocent face and I told the doorman to let him in and I said to the boss: ‘Champagne for Keith Haring.’”

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Shard free-climber George King scales Barcelona skyscraper – video

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George King has free-climbed the Melia Barcelona Sky hotel in the Catalonian capital. His first such climb was in 2019, when he scaled the Shard in central London without safety ropes or suction pads at the age of 19. The skyscraper's managers later took him to court, where he was given a 24-week prison sentence

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5,000 attend rock concert in Barcelona after Covid screening

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Performance at Palau Sant Jordi concert hall in Barcelona on Saturday night recalls pre-pandemic times

If one overlooked the white face masks dotting the tightly packed crowd of music lovers, it was almost like pre-pandemic times in Barcelona’s Palau Sant Jordi concert hall Saturday night.

Five thousand rock fans enjoyed a real-as-can-be concert after passing a same-day coronavirus screening to test its effectiveness in preventing outbreaks of the virus at large cultural events.

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Chariots of steel: Barcelona’s hidden army of scrap recyclers

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Thousands of migrants play a key role in collecting Catalonia’s waste but must live on the margins

They are everywhere and yet they are almost invisible, living below the social radar as they crisscross the city pushing supermarket trolleys piled with metal tubing, old microwaves and empty beer cans.

The chatarreros are Barcelona’s itinerant scrap-metal collectors, and there are thousands of them. Most are undocumented migrants and so there is no official census, but Federico Demaria, a social scientist at the University of Barcelona who is conducting a study of the informal recyclers in Catalonia, believes there are between 50,000 and 100,000 in the region. About half are from sub-Saharan Africa; the rest are from eastern Europe, elsewhere in Africa and Spain.

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Spain braces for fifth nigth of protest over arrest of Pablo Hasél

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Police and demonstrators clashed again in Barcelona during demonstrations over the jailing of Pablo Hasél

Police and demonstrators in Barcelona clashed for a fifth night on Saturday, with thousands taking to the streets across Spain to protest against the jailing of a controversial rapper for glorifying terrorism and insulting royalty in his music and on Twitter.

Angry demonstrations first erupted on Tuesday after police detained Pablo Hasél, 32, and took him to jail to start serving a nine-month sentence in a highly contentious free speech case.

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Catalan parties talk of separation, but for voters, health is the priority

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In tomorrow’s election, public services are a huge concern for the people as politicians debate independence

Much has changed in Poblenou over the past four years – not least the arrival of a pandemic that has devastated tourism and employment – but the people of the traditional working-class barrio in the north of Barcelona are struggling with a nagging sense of deja vu over Sunday’s regional election.

“All the talk is about independence but what most of us want from politicians is to solve social problems,” says Nuria Vallejo, a doctor working in the public sector who has lived in the neighbourhood for 20 years. “Number one is the health crisis, and then there’s the education system and questions of sustainability.”

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Two-way street: how Barcelona is democratising public space

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Citizens are finally getting the urban patios and parks promised when the cramped medieval city was extended in the 1900s

At the turn of the 20th century, the Catalan engineer Ildefons Cerdà had a revolutionary idea for extending Barcelona beyond the cramped confines of its medieval walls. In the grid system of the extension he planned, each city block would be built around a large open space or patio, designed to be a park for residents.

When he began his work, the old city was hemmed in physically and psychologically, desperately overcrowded and disease-ridden, with frequent outbreaks of cholera and a lower life expectancy than London or Paris.

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Deadly blaze in Barcelona building used by migrants – video

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Firefighters tackle a blaze in an abandoned industrial building squatted by migrants near Barcelona. At least two people have died and 17 have been injured, five seriously, in the blaze in Badalona which broke out in the small hours. Firefighters fear that more people could be trapped inside and that the building could collapse

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Cities can lead a green revolution after Covid. In Barcelona, we’re showing how | Ada Colau

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From non-polluting transport to sustainable industries, urban areas are perfect for testing radical solutions to global problems

• Ada Colau is the mayor of Barcelona

The pandemic will leave behind a very different world from that of a year ago. Thousands of people have died; entire industries have been brought to the brink; welfare states have been shaken. In the coming years, the major challenge facing all public leaders will be charting a path of recovery through the devastating human, social and economic marks that Covid-19 has left on our societies.

But rather than redoubling on the fragile world of the pre-pandemic age, we should be taking advantage of this moment to build one that is more just, balanced and sustainable.

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