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.