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Barcelona, Pub Crawl in the Raval

Guggestions for a pub crawl in Barcelona’s Raval. Hmmm…why is it whenever I type the word ‘suggestion’ it always appears on on my Word document as ‘guggestion’? ‘Suggestions for a pub crawl in the Raval’, that was what the blog people told me to write.
I wonder whether Hemingway would have have been willing to blog for some extra cash, as a young whippersnapper? If he was, and he found himself writing this one, he’d scribble something about London Bar, once upon a time the literary hard man’s preferred local. Located on the Raval’s Carrer Nou de La Rambla this historic old pub was also frequented by Picasso, Dali and George Orwell, though probably never all of them at the same time…and retains a lively Bohemian atmosphere today, with live jazz and blues music.
Around the corner on Carrer Sant Pau is Bar Marsella, whose seedy interior evokes the age of Art Nouveau and Ladies in flowery bonnets sitting on the laps of delapidated men, furiously puffing away in braces and breeches. Marsella is renouned for its absynthe, which one burns with a flame of sugar perched on a spoon. A couple of glasses of this green liquor and a lucid form of madness follows, with wild hallucinations. According to the urban legend that is.
Out of Marsella one stumbles and, gasp, its three o’clock in the morning! Alas, all the bars have closed! But hooray, Barcelona’s most unique nightspot, La Paloma, is open! Immortalised in the film Una Casa de Locos, La Paloma is a beautiful old theatre with frescoed ceiling, converted into raucous nightclub with thumping dance music.

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