Barcelona

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Shopping tips and trends

Great shopping is nothing new in Barcelona. Ever since the Middle Ages it has been a city of craftsmen and traders, and though modern shoppers may be seeking Camper shoes rather than fishermen‘s clogs, it remains one of the top commercial destinations on the Mediterranean.

Like any other western city, mall culture is growing and the main shopping arteries are increasingly dominated by chains, but this invasion does not seem to have affected Barcelona’s love affair with small speciality stores. Shops in the Old City are just as likely to sell homemade sausage or espadrilles as they are Nike trainers or Levi’s.

 

Barcelona’s famous obsession with originality and design is echoed in the incredible number of new openings devoted to boutique fashion, jewellery, furniture and interior decor. Nobody seems to open shops that aren’t cool and, as the shoe repairers and ironmongers give way to futon shops and hairdressing salons, one wonders how the city’s shoppers can support such a quantity of luxury goods. Not to mention where they might buy something as dully utilitarian as a stopcock or printer cartridge.

Market trends
Market shopping is on the rise among young people, and recent surveys show that over half of citizens aged 25 to 34 regularly shop at municipal markets. This is at least partly due to a huge municipal advertising campaign and a €50-million programme to reinvent Barcelona’s markets. Of the most central, Santa Caterina and Poblenou are newly completed, Barceloneta is due to reopen in March 2007 and the much-loved Mercat Sant Antoni will be closed from 2007 to 2010 while it is transformed into ‘the most modern market in Europe’. This being Barcelona, the makeovers are architecturally striking – none more so than Enric Miralles’ undulating Mercat de Santa Caterina – and they have also become focal points for urban redevelopment.

 

Despite all the noise about eating fresh greens, the irony is that the new generation of markets generally hold far fewer stalls than before, with the extra space turned over to incorporate supermarkets, restaurants and even internet cafés. Speciality storesBarcelona’s rich and thriving scene of tiny speciality shops has attracted an ever-growing number of foreign small traders, be they traders in Moroccan slippers or Chinese calligraphy pens. Barcelona’s best source for Spanish farmhouse cheeses, Formatgeria La Seu, is owned by a Scottish woman, while the friendly candymakers boiling and rolling up sweets at Papabubble are Australian. Fertile areas for browsing include the Barri Gòtic, Born, Raval and Gràcia.

 

Fashion first
It’s not all Mango and Zara. Barcelona’s reputation as a haven for niche-label designers is growing thanks to the constant stream of new designers from the city’s prestigious fashion schools. Young designers to look out for when you’re browsing through the flash-in-the-pan boutiques around C/Avinyó in the Barri Gòtic, the MACBA area in the Raval or C/Verdi in Gràcia include Raquel Cardona, Juma Alemany, Alberto Tous and Helena Minenko. At the top of the heap, Custodio Dalmau’s label, Custo Barcelona, is the city’s major success story but other big guns include Josep Font, Lydia Delgado and Antonio Miró, all to be found uptown.

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