Travels in Spain: Barcelona’s Ramblas and Mercat de la Boqueria

“Today, for most people, the Ramblas is Barcelona.”
—  Robert Hughes, Barcelona the Great Enchantress

The Ramblas, Barcelona

“The humanity of the Rambla!  It’s an inscrutably human street!  So many stories come and go every day from these cafes, shops, and stairways!  The air is saturated with their human feet.”
— Josep Pla, The Gray Notebook, translated by Peter Bush

“The Ramblas is and always will be one of the great, seedy, absorbing theaters of Spain, or for that matter of Europe.”
—  Robert Hughes, Barcelona the Great Enchantress

Mercat de la Boqueria

My favorite part of strolling the Ramblas was our little detour into the grand food market, Mercat de la Boqueria, which reminded me of Seattle’s Pike Place Market and the one on Granville Island in Vancouver, B.C.  An overwhelming panorama of vibrant colors, prepared dishes, and raw food.

“[The Boqueria] is the hub and heart of both Barcelona’s gastronomy and its everyday eating.  Its site was originally occupied by the sixteenth-century convent of Sant Josep and the fourteenth-century one of Santa Maria.  Hang me for a gluttonous atheist if you will, but compared to the increase of human happiness afforded by this great market, the loss of a couple of convents is nothing. . . .

For any serious lover of food — which most Catalans aggressively are — there is no other place in the world quite like the Boqueria, that vast covered space crammed with stalls that display just about everything short of human flesh that could conceivably be eaten, from skinned rabbits (their moist eyes still peering reproachfully at the hardhearted shopper) to soft brown hills of newly shot but unplucked partridges, neatly tied fagots of expensive but irresistible angullos or jamon Serrano. . . . If there were a grocery, butcher, and fishmonger attached to the Garden of Eden, in which one could sample what terrestrial food tasted like before the fall of man, it would be something like the Boqueria.”
—  Robert Hughes, Barcelona the Great Enchantress