A BETTER BARCELONA

In a city as popular as the Catalonian capital, is it still possible to step off the tourist trail? R. O. Kwon returns in search of the more subdued Barcelona of her memories.

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If I mention this to friends, they tend to bring up the water-pistol protests. In July 2024, some Barcelona residents sprayed water at tourists eating on Las Ramblas, a storied pedestrian street. The people deploying the pistols were taking part in a larger protest against a tourism surge that, in 2023, brought an estimated 16 million visitors to a city with 1.7 million inhabitants. Before I went, I read about packed streets lined with shops selling cheap trinkets and bachelor-party revelers. It didn’t sound like a place anyone would want to visit. It also didn’t sound much like the Barcelona I used to know.

I first visited the city as a college student, when I took a summer job in Madrid, and fell for it to such an extent that, for a while, I jumped at every chance I could to return. I went to Barcelona during my honeymoon; when my partner’s work required that he travel to Barcelona, I tagged along. Craving the city’s architecture, food, art, and nightlife, I ended up visiting half a dozen times, but I hadn’t been back in a decade. How much could Barcelona have changed in those years?

I also heard the government was taking major steps toward making the city a more livable place for residents, including setting up superillas, or superblocks—streets open mainly to pedestrians and cyclists, with pocket parks at the intersections. (My friend Erin Nixon, who until recently ran a wine bar in the El Born district, described the superblocks as “game changers.”) Hoping to counteract prohibitive housing costs, the city’s mayor has also committed to completely phasing out short-term rentals, such as those found on Airbnb, by 2029.