Spaniards really like their bars.
There are probably more bars in Spain per capita than any other European country, roughly one bar for every 175 people, according to a recent count.
And maybe no city in Spain reveres its bars as much as Barcelona. They are historical, cultural and usually, personal. Imagine Spanish “Cheers” and you start to get an idea. But in recent years, many of these establishments, known as bodegas — the kind populated by locals, with wooden casks of wine and vermut on tap — had been dying off.
The culprit?
“In two words: rents and greed,” said Ricard Martin, the food and drink editor for Time Out Barcelona. When rental laws were loosened around 2014, he said, landlords hiked rents that had long been regulated. Many bodega owners couldn’t afford them, sold off their licenses and retired. The places that opened in their wake weren’t aimed at inhabitants, but at tourists.
But as concerns about overtourism grew across the country, locals pushed back. In 2014, two local businessmen, Lito Baldovinos and Enric Rebodosa, bought one of Barcelona’s most forgotten bars, La Confiteria, to revive it. It worked: In 2015 the City Council designated the bar an “emblematic establishment,” which marks it as a business worthy of protection. To date, their company, Grupo Confiteria, has saved 15 establishments.
“What makes these bars unique is that they’re not designed as concepts. They’re the result of time,” Mr. Baldovinos said. “Layers of history, architecture, habits and people accumulate naturally.”
If you know where to look across the city, the bodegas are still there. Each bears their neighborhood’s fingerprint, but also shares a common trait: They look like they were decorated from a yard sale. Maybe there’s a trumpet on a shelf, or a painting of someone’s dead grandmother. Perhaps a framed picture of a sports team, or a black-and-white photo from a century earlier when everyone wore hats.
During a recent two-week stay, I wandered Barcelona in search of bodegas. This list isn’t definitive — think of it as a snapshot of neighborhood bars romantically stuck in the Barcelona of decades, maybe centuries, past.
BAR GELIDA
On my first day out, jackpot: Bar Gelida in the middle of the Eixample neighborhood. Even in the early afternoon the bar was lousy with locals three deep. Its tiled walls and tall ceilings had a way of amplifying the conversation and the fluorescent, unflattering lighting. Gelida sits on the corner — which isn’t the usual 90-degree corner of most city blocks. In Eixample each street corner is cut at a 45-degree angle, or “chamfered,” creating octagonal intersections. The result is more sidewalk real estate to grab a table, order a plate of tripe stew and smoke.
Carrer de la Diputació, 133
BAR BODEGA GOL
Bar Bodega Gol, in the San Antoni neighborhood, is what you would get if you crossed a 75-year-old Catalonian bar with a loud, passionate soccer club. A handful of men were outside wearing Adidas track suits, smoking cigarettes and debating a match. Inside, the walls were lined with framed pictures of players, jerseys, trophies, pennants, soccer balls — everything but the pitch. Pity the person in an AC Milan jersey.
Every table was packed with glasses of beer and plates of pintxos: patatas bravas, calamari in olive oil, peppers, anchovies speared with a toothpick. (Bars, unlike restaurants, serve pintxos at room temperature.) People were speaking Catalan and Spanish, and laughing, eating, debating, arguing. Just not a word of English.
Carrer del Parlament, 10
EL POLLO
El Pollo’s windows are perfectly positioned to take in businessmen, students and professionals walking outside, meeting up with friends at sidewalk cafes or jumping on their Vespas. I ordered a piece of Spanish tortilla, a glass of Verdejo and sat down to voyeur away an afternoon with my friend Kiki in the neighborhood of El Raval.
“We’re old fashioned in Barcelona. We believe that meeting people in real life is important,” said the owner Aimar Cordoba Bilbao. He has owned El Pollo for five years, but his ethos is loyal to a much older past. “It’s my grandmother’s recipe,” he said, pointing to the tortillas.
Carrer del Tigre, 31
BAR BODEGA MARIN
Small and dimly lit, Bar Bodega Marin in the Gracia neighborhood has walls lined with wine bottles, casks and cases. Luis Sologuren, a Venezuelan man who bought the bar with his wife, Vanessa, in 2022, told me that since 1896 there have only been four owners. “In the old days, the usual customer was maybe 80 or 90 years old, and he would order one beer and sit on the same stool for three hours. It was not sustainable.”
Mr. Sologuren now serves food and sells wine, but a few old-timers still enjoy sitting on the same stool for the better part of the afternoon.
Carrer de Milà i Fontanals, 72
BIANCO NOIR
Technically, Bianco Noir, in El Raval, was opened by an Italian man and his French wife. But the décor, the lighting and the vibe are thoroughly of Barcelona. An ancient stone wall on one side, shelves of wine and liquor on the other, Bianco Noir feels like it hasn’t changed in a century.
The bar serves pintxos as well as larger meals like lentil stew, even bowls of pasta. “We don’t work to get rich,” said Christian Torlone, an owner, referring to bodega owners. “We don’t serve paella and sangria, the tourist menu.”
“I wanted to open a bar where people have a nice chat, enjoy a glass of wine, maybe watch a Barce game,” he added. “The bodegas of the 21st century have no soul. I wanted a place with a soul.”
Carrer de la Riera Alta, 8
QUIMET Y QUIMET
Standing room only, line out the door, an array of food limited only by your imagination: This is the phenomenon of Quimet Y Quimet in the neighborhood of El Poble-sec.
When it opened in 1914, the bar only sold its own vintage but as the neighborhood grew, so did the bar’s offerings — eventually including a huge selection of wine, vermut and food. Shrimp with roasted red peppers, leeks with caviar, beans with cod, salted tuna with artichokes, anchovies with olives, some things glistening in olive oil, others dripping in honey, jamon in every form.
What didn’t change was the owner: Quimet Y Quimet has been in the same family for over a century.
Carrer del Poeta Cabanyes, 25
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