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El Raval

Christmas in El Raval

The barri of El Raval (Arabic for ‘an area outside the walls’) is the largest section of the old city, closed in by the Ramblas, Avinguda del Paral.lel and the Rondas of Sant Pau, Sant Antoni and Universitat.

Originally a preserve of orchards and gardens, the Raval was embraced into the city by the 14th-century walls. Convents and monasteries moved in to fill up the gaps between the gardens, while other corners became havens for the city’s rejects – its unpleasant trades (tanning and butchering), its criminals, its poor and diseased.

Things got worse in the 19th century. The Raval boomed along with Barcelona’s industrial revolution. Cheap land attracted the first factories; workers were cramming into new tenement districts near them, and by the 1850s the Raval (then known as El Quinto, the Fifth District) was one of the unhealthiest and most wretched neighbourhoods in Europe. The average life expectancy was 40 years; criminally low pay, coal smoke, epidemics and illiteracy were the order of the day.

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Antic Hospital de la Santa Creu

The National Library of Catalonia

Avinguda del Paral.lel

Old Barcelona's Great White Way

Bar Marsella

Meet the green fairy

Barrí Xinès

The shadow of a slum

Centre de Cultura Contemporània

From work house to art house

Filmoteca de Catalunya

Catalonia's film archive

Hotel España

Sleep and Eat in a Modernista gem

Mercat de Sant Antoni

An iron palace for produce and books

Museu d'Art Contemporani (MACBA)

A Bright White Frigate of Art floating over El Raval

Palau Güell

An early Gaudí masterpiece

Plaça del Pedró

Barcelona's oldest monument

Sant Agustí

A rare Neoclassical bit of BCN

Sant Pau del Camp

Barcelona's best Romanesque church

Text © Dana Facaros & Michael Pauls

Image by Michael James