Private tour of the Raval neighborhood with an official guide

The royal shipyard of the Crown of Aragon, built between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and expanded in the sixteenth century under Pere el Cerimoniós. Sixteen parallel stone ships where the galleys with which Aragon dominated the western Mediterranean for two hundred years were manufactured. It is the best preserved medieval shipyard in the world; today it houses the Maritime Museum of Barcelona. The guide explains the relationship between les Reials Drassanes, the medieval port and the commercial expansion of the Crown of Aragon that made Barcelona one of the most important cities in Europe in the 14th century.

Built between 1886 and 1890 by Antoni Gaudí for the textile industrialist Eusebi Güell, the Palau Güell is the first large-scale work that Gaudí executed in Barcelona. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984. The guide explains the two parabolic arches of the façade, the iron slabs of the doors, the roof terrace with the trencadís-clad chimneys – the ceramic technique that Gaudí would later perfect in Park Güell and the Sagrada Família – and why Güell chose this site in the Raval, then an area with a very bad reputation, to build his private residence.

The Raval began to be called Barrio Chino in 1925 when the journalist Francesc Madrid borrowed the name of the marginal neighborhood of San Francisco to describe this sector in an article, without there ever being a Chinese community in the area. It was the sector where the brothels, gambling dens and varietés venues frequented by sailors and the bohemians of the interwar period were concentrated. Jean Genet lived here in the late thirties and described it in Diary of the Thief . The guide walks through the streets of Carrer de la Cera and the surroundings of Sant Pau explaining the urban morphology before the great demolitions of the Interior Reform Plan and what the urbanism of the twentieth century took ahead. The official name of the neighborhood has always been and still is El Raval.

Inaugurated in 1847, the Liceu is one of the five most important opera houses in Europe and the largest in Spain in terms of seating capacity. Built by private subscription -without public funding- as a symbol of the new Catalan industrial bourgeoisie. It suffered a partial fire in 1861, the anarchist attack of 1893 in which two Orsini bombs were thrown from paradise during a performance -twenty dead-, and the total fire of January 1994 that completely destroyed it. The guide reconstructs these episodes and explains the reconstruction, inaugurated in 1999.

The Rambla del Raval was opened in 2000 through the demolition of an entire block of 19th century buildings: four streets disappeared to create this boulevard 320 meters long and 48 meters wide. The urban operation exemplifies the Barcelona City Council’s sponging strategy in the densest fabric of the neighborhood. At its center is Fernando Botero’s Gato (2003), a 3.5-meter bronze sculpture donated by the Colombian sculptor to the city. The guide explains the urban logic of the intervention, its consequences in terms of displacement of neighbors and why the debate on the gentrification of the Raval is still open.

Project by Richard Meier, inaugurated in 1995. The white building, with its glass ramps overlooking the Plaça dels Àngels, was the first great gesture of urban regeneration in the Raval. From day one, the square became one of the most renowned urban skate spots in Europe – a scene that has existed for thirty years and is now in danger of disappearing: since January 2025 Plaça dels Àngels has been undergoing expansion works by MACBA with the idea of replacing the ramps where skaters used to train with green areas and other spaces. The museum remains open during the works. The guide explains the relationship between MACBA, the CCCB and the cultural strategy of the City Council to transform the image of the Raval in the nineties, and what this new intervention implies for the neighborhood thirty years later.

Founded in 1401 by order of King Martí l’Humà, it was for almost five hundred years the largest hospital in Barcelona. It was in its rooms that Antoni Gaudí died on June 12, 1926, three days after being run over by a streetcar on Gran Via – his state of neglect led the rescue services to take him for a beggar. Today the Gothic building houses the Biblioteca de Catalunya and the Institut d’Estudis Catalans. The inner courtyard, which is open to the public, is one of the most surprising and least visited spaces in the city.

Inaugurated in 2012 in the building designed by Josep Lluís Mateo. The square is named after the anarcho-syndicalist leader of the CNT murdered in 1923 by gunmen of the Patronal, at the height of the pistolerismo in Barcelona. The guide explains the context of the workers’ struggles in the Raval at the beginning of the 20th century, which had here one of its central scenarios.

The oldest Benedictine monastery in Barcelona, first documented in 911, rebuilt in the 12th century in the Lombard Romanesque style. Sant Pau del Camp means “Saint Paul in the countryside”: when it was founded, the monastery was surrounded by farmland, far from the urban center. Today it is completely integrated into the fabric of 19th century blocks. The floor plan, the cloister and the Romanesque capitals are still intact. It is one of the least visited and most valuable medieval buildings in the Raval.

The most famous covered market in Spain, with its origins in the open-air market that vendors used to set up in front of the old Porta de la Boqueria. The iron structure that now covers it was built between 1840 and 1853 on the site of the convent of Sant Josep, disentailed in 1835. The guide explains the history of the market and the difference between what the tourist-oriented stalls sell and what the locals sell – a contrast that tells, in miniature, the story of what has happened to the Raval in the last thirty years.