Barcelona: Sniffing around the Mediterranean's Cultural Capital like a Pyrenese Sheephound

Night one in the Raval, and there's a power out. In contrast to the tealight-lit scramble of ESB grid failures, the neighbourhood's pretty chill about the whole thing. The grid of shady lanes stays shady, the atmosphere's static energy continues to discharge, the hookers continue to hustle - apart from the usually ably-lit Rambla del Raval and its resident Gat Botero*, there's no discernible difference in ambiance in the city's most naturally nocturnal neighbourhood.
We're spoilt for amenities at our apartment. Weed is available on nearly a door-to-door basis. Stick your head out the window and you can whistle a recently-immigrated prositute up to help finish off your Wok To Walk. Talk to the right Canadian on the street and you'll wind up slamming absinthe til dawn. Plus, there's a sweet Indian across the square that doesn't seem to ever close. We're at the epicentre of sleaze and therefore, as is the case in most European cities, the very core of the city's alternative culture.

The electrical current resumes. Lights flicker back on. The shopfront gangs and local residents mutter, loaf about, and mutter some more. Thirty seconds later, the lights are out again. Antithetically, a cheer goes up. Things are getting a bit Rec 2. The Raval is back in its natural state.

There's a thrill-level sense of danger walking around in the mumbling blackness - like with all good theme park rides, if you keep your hands within the carriage you're safe enough. Still, unless you're here on a sex or drug tourism buzz (surely not!), you're probably best confining Raval rambling to the day time. You'll quickly notice that barcelonins never travel alone. Divvy the civilians up, and you'll find three demographics - i) boys with cute girls/girls with cute boys, ii) boys or girls with cute dogs, and iii) boys with a pack of at least four other boys that aren't very cute at all. Even by day, the laneways are chicken-pox dotted with small groups of disgruntled-looking men spitting, swearing, and scowling at passersby. It's like a never-ending Finglas shopfront.

In the midst of a quite hands-on policia bust of a young North African guy's pockets, I plucked up the courage to approach Djamil, smoking and spitting outside a backstreet bakery (a bakery that necessitates not one, but three casino machines in its rather cramped interior).
"Hey Djamil. What're they taking off that guy?"
"It's just shit. He sells nothing."
"Why him? Everybody around here sells shit."
"He is... new. Every new one gets cop trouble."
"So they're just showing who's boss, basically? Do you or your friends get in trouble with them?"
Djamil looks aghast. "I am not selling shit. They are not selling shit. We work in here [he points at the bakery-cum-minicasino] for him [he points at the group's most elderly member]. We are all friends, you know."
"But you're here when the bakery's closed. I thought you were a gang - why don't you all go to a bar, or something?"
"What do you do with your friends? The street is OK for us."
I gesture at a rather robust, domineering pack of prostitutes who we've earmarked since our arrival as the lionesses of the neighbourhood. "The street seems to be OK with them too. Do you have any dealings with them?"
"They are... cunts. They are for you, they are for English. We want to pay, we know better places."

Djamil's demographic are like overgrown teenagers - and you're probably in better hands perambulating the Raval than Finglas. Sometimes equally terrifying, though more often just plain slick, are the dog-walkers. There's a different sort of symbiosis between dog and man in Barcelona. Over the course of a week, every dog we see is totally streamlined, and every owner glued to it in a Phillip Pullman-esque fashion.

We're ass-parked in a cove in Parc Guell*, when Dave, a cricket-like middle-aged individual, hopskips by, dragged by a magnificent dog whose name we can't pronounce.
"He's a Pyrenese Sheephound," Dave explains in a nasal-toned Canadian accent (Dave is a radio DJ by trade, and though his radio voice isn't the most appealing, his promise of 'Scottish folk and Japanese indie-pop' has us intrigued).
"Is he bilingual?" Aisling enquires.
"Oh sure, he's trained in Catalan and English."
"He looks magic, he doesn't look real," Bobby points out. He's got a point. The dog sports a mane and eerily Pokemon-like perfection.
"Well, he actually can do magic tricks!"
We beg for a sample. Dave removes keys from his pocket with a jangle and places them carefully on the surface of Gaudi's chiselled stone bridge. "Watch this..." he raises his eyebrow conspiratorially. He issues a command to his glorious dog and, perhaps because of the antiquated air of Parc Guell and the sheer impressiveness of its Catalonia-wide panaroma, or perhaps because of other mitigating factors, we all expect the keys to disappear into the ether, or for the sheephound to disintegrate them in a ball of fire.

Instead, he picks them clumsily up in his perfect fangs, and deposits them in Dave's outstretched hand. The magic is that Dave knows the Catalan for 'fetch'.
We never get around to listening to his show.

Dave's cameo in Parc Guell is immediately followed by the entrance of a cute couple, our third demographic. Dimitri and Cappa have come from Moscow. Dimitri's here for Sonar and Cappa's here for Primavera, the city's two biggest music festivals. We're here for Primavera (though as Dimitri lists the line-up in his chequered English, I find myself wishing we could swap tickets), and we have fun explaining the difference between 'Beach House' and 'Peaches' to him. While Cappa makes my friends swoon with her encyclopaedic knowledge of Pitchfork indie, Dimitri boasts about his dubstep nous. I ask him if he's found anywhere sweet for bass music in Barcelona, and he mentions a club night in Razzmatazz (alarm bells ring at the sound of the city's notorious super-club - later investigation reveals the night is lacklustre as the usual Razz fodder). Outside of Sonar, the city's electronic scene appears to be in deep hibernation.

One arm of the Raval's labyrinth, whose name I never had the presence of mind to take note of (though head out the sidedoor of La Central, the city's best bookshop, and you'll be on it), is home to a single commercial unit - an old garage transformed into a techno, house and bass record shop. It's siesta-hour for most Spaniards, but inside the shop owner and his vinylmate are giving it socks on the shop's decks. I peruse until they mix in a song I (think I) recognize, and take my opportunity.

"Hey! This is track number 8 from that obscure London label-owner's second album under his third pseudonym in 2009!" The shopowner looks like I've walked into Eddie Rocket's and recognized 'Build Me Up Buttercup', but engages nonetheless. "You've got an awful lot of English and American records here - haven't you got a Barcelona section?"
"We have a few small labels here. Probably as many Irish records as Barcelona records." He flicks out a Dublin-based labels 12inch for proof.
"Does a festival as big as Sonar not give Barca electronic music a bigger incentive?"
"The problem is that dance music here is still like Ibiza. It's still superclubs. The venues, they only book big DJs. Shit DJs. There is too much money to lose"
"Where do I go if I don't want to see Armand Van Helden?"
"There are always parties with great DJs. Producers are not very good here, but DJs are. You need to know where to go." With this, he offers me some convoluted directions to a party in a converted warehouse in the Barcelona equivalent of Sandyford later that night, with a promising hint to 'not arrive until 4am'. There's no Green LUAS line in Barcelona, so I end up not taking my chances.

Notice anything about my pseudo-sociological guide to the Catalan capital? Yep, none of my new friends are Barcelona natives. Rather than a case of foreigner-attracting-foreigner, though, this can be quite simply pinned down to Barcelona's cosmopolitan make-up - which opens up a discourse as to what REAL Barcelona (as opposed to Real Madrid, ho ho) is. A recent news piece in the Observer told the story of a graffiti artist who has been zipping around the city's hotspots and plastering them in anti-tourist slogans (note - one of the Primavera travel party in fact ended up befriending an anarchist-leaning group actually responsible for the graffiti) - the essential point being that the city council is pandering to a Certain Type Of Tourist, and eroding the city's core culture in the process. What's more important here though, is the messenger rather than the slogan: two members out of three of said graffiti group are actually recent immigrants from Paris. Civilians for only four or five years, it's quite remarkable the sense of ownership they (and indeed all the other non-natives I met) have for the city. Integration is quick, and the initiation test seems to be entirely based on your attitude: are you Barcelona enough to be here?

On return to Dublin semi-normality I asked Anusia, a former Barcelona blow-in about her time there. 'It certainly appears that the population in Barcelona is 50/50 locals to blow-ins. Barcelona attracts a certain type of person, generally fun-loving and laidback, all the good qualities which you will find in the local people themselves. They really are a good-looking people and a stroll around the city is definitely a feast for the eyes. My first time in BCN I got a bollicking from an older lady for speaking in Spanish rather than Catalan. But on the whole, most people are very accommodating and I think the general rule is that if you make the effort to attempt the odd palabra in Castellano, you're A.O.K.'.

Criticizing Barcelona's civic powers-that-be for their allowance of ten dozen t-shirt shops and countless knock-off tapas bars along the infamously scuzzy La Rambla while we sit on the Leprechaun-endorsed pot of gold that is Temple Bar is a bit like the pot calling the kettle a sell-out - as with Dublin, good visitors have good visits, and digging out your own niche away from the globalized streets of central Barcelona and the disposable-camera-flash of the Barri Gotic is way easy.* Shoppers should hit Le Swing (Calle del Doctor Dou, 11), eaters should swing by the Biocenter (Pintor Fortuny, 25), art fans will find inspirational contemporary work at Angels Barcelona (C/Pintor Fortuny 27) and ADN Galeria (C/ Enric Granados, 49) , though skate fans should certainly hit the Modern Art Museum (MACBA, Plaça dels Àngels 1). You'll get the sickest collection of novels both big, small, graphic, and far-too-graphic at the previously mentioned La Central (several branches can be found at www.lacentral.com/), and beardy types can indulge their folky lust for a good beer at bar/barn Vinil(o) (C /Matilde 2). Deviate from the roadmap, speak to people with paint on their hands or mojitos on their lips and you'll likely wind up somewhere memorable.

*Gat Botero, or El Gat del Raval, is probably the only fat cat you'll see lounging around this particular square. Composed of steel, or something like it, Botero's sculpture is sort of like an engorged version of that cow on Wolfe Tone Square, only with 16% less junkie activity in its vicinity.

* Parc Guell. It was only after traversing 6 public escalators and a gradient of approximately 223% that we copped that there was an entrance that not only required far less exertion and loss of body fluid but was far more appealing to aesthetic sensibilities at the other side of Gaudi's famous park. Other realizations that quickly followed included - there is no grass here, if Gaudi was such a genius then how come this roadway bridge feels like it's collapsing underneath us, Phoenix Park would be so much more impressive if you could see Morocco from it.

* For the advanced Barcelona challenge, try and find worthy ways to spend time WITHIN the tourist bubble. Non-terrible ways to spend an afternoon include visiting the Gothic's H&M which compensates for depressing clothes with breathtaking architecture - many of the high street shops are housed within some of the city's most spectacular edifices, allowing you a refreshing opportunity to see inside the Art Nouveau - and playing with the rather too-snugly caged animals in the Rambla's makeshift pet stall. The Gothic quarter is architecturally gorgeous - take a trail through it towards Born early in the day to avoid stampede-related injuries and low-flying Fuji cameras.

Between civic authorities cracking down on the practice, and the rather bloated market of graffiti artists selling their canvases and prints for extortionate prices in the city's galleries, Barcelona's once-vibrant street art culture has degraded from its turn-of-the-Millenium high water mark. Nevertheless, most suburban walls are still plastered with spray paint, and the dozens of demolition sites around town are graffiti magnets. Ripo is an American-born resident of the city, and one of its sweetest concrete artists.

What's your personal relationship with Barcelona like?
I've known her for about seven years. We moved in together five years ago. She can be a bitch sometimes but she knows how to have fun.

Graffiti artists are social commentators first - what disgruntles you about the city, what issues do you deal with in your street art?
Gentrification is always a good one.

Barcelona street art is considered amongst the best in the world - who are the most vibrant names to watch out for now?
Barcelona street art WAS considered amongst the best in the world. That's changed since 2005. I'm inevitably going to be leaving some people out, no hard feelings, but some of the guys doing it up in the city now would have to be Aryz, Grito, Smash137, Kenor, SpankFK, and Yesk.

Is there a tolerance from authorities for what you're doing?
Zero.

What's the current state of culture in general in the city, in your opinion?
"It all sounds nice in theory but who's got the money for it?"

Where's your favourite piece of street art in the city?
It's always changing here since the buff is pretty hard.

Words: Daniel Gray