El Barrio Chino de Barcelona

Opened in 1860, Casa Almirall was founded at the height of the Raval’s industrial boom, when the neighborhood filled with factories, workshops, and a working-class population living in harsh, overcrowded conditions. In that context, cafés and taverns became key spaces of sociability: places where newspapers were read, politics debated, and community woven together. Just across the street stood the headquarters of the CNT, the major anarchist trade union that shaped Barcelona’s labor history, and Casa Almirall was a direct witness to that social fervor. Over glasses of anís, militants and neighbors shared breaks, debates, and everyday life throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

Located on Carrer de les Carretes, Makinavaja is a living tribute to comic artist Ivà and his most famous character, “Makinavaja, el último choriso.” Its owner, Leandro, a lifelong local and anarchist activist, has turned the bar into a stronghold of Raval’s popular and libertarian culture. Although the bar itself opened in 2010, it occupies a space that has housed taverns for over a century, preserving a nearly century-old solid wood bar.

Founded in 1910, London Bar is one of the oldest bars in Barcelona and one of the few in the Raval that still preserves its original modernista décor. Carved wood, mirrors, moldings, lamps, and the spatial layout have remained largely unchanged for over a century. The venue has passed through different stages of the neighborhood’s and the city’s history without being converted or stripped of its interior, making it a rare example of modernisme applied to a popular bar in the Raval.

Founded in 1947 just behind the Columbus monument, Pastís was created with the intention of recreating the port bars of Marseille in Barcelona. The venue is tiny barely a slit in the wall yet filled with an existentialist, bohemian atmosphere. Its walls are covered with dark paintings, old photographs, and bottles, creating a space where time seems to have stopped in the postwar years.

Founded in 1820, Bar Marsella is the oldest bar in Barcelona and one of the great survivors of the old Raval. For over a century, its surroundings were the epicenter of the city’s most intense and marginal nightlife: a crossroads of workers, sailors, prostitutes, artists, and bohemians that gave rise to the mythical Barrio Chino. Marsella did not close even during the Spanish Civil War and still preserves its decadent atmosphere: blackened lamps, dust-covered bottles, peeling walls. Nothing shines and that’s precisely its charm. In a deeply transformed neighborhood, Marsella remains standing, indifferent to trends, like a living portrait of an irreverent Barcelona that has almost disappeared.