Flamenco walking tour

A wander around the most flamenco of districts in Barcelona

Neither the lower districts of Genoa, nor the port district of Marseilles, nor the Parisian Vilette, nor Whitechapel in London can compare to our wonderful Chinatown, or to the atmosphere of this forbidden area, where the heart-rending lament of flamenco will follow you everywhere. What’s more Barcelona’s barrio chino surpasses them.

There’s no other district in the whole world with more sparkle.

Coinciding with the universal exhibitions of 1888 and 1929, Barcelona would be able to count on having one of the raciest districts in Europe, and its soundtrack would be flamenco. From this same district such gems as Carmen Amaya, a gypsy born in Somorrostro and who prided herself on her Barcelona roots, would shine. She would become the most universal bailaora – flamenco dancer.

In those days you could hear Manuel Torre or Antonio Chacón coming from the gramophone in the Ca’l Manquet; the upper echelons of the Bullfighting world would gather at the Hotel Oriente; and Carmen Amaya, just a girl, who Sebastià Gasch described as “the interpretation of the soul through dance”, would show off her talent in any one of the fifty bars in the area which offered flamenco.

We will discover the Barri del Portal, nicknamed ‘La Islita’ by Vázquez Montalbán, the cradle of the Rumba Catalana, where the stars of this musical genre are still living today: Peret; Los Amaya; Chipen…

However, hardly anything remains of the gloomy, sombre and seedy barrio chino depicted by so many authors. Amongst others: Jean Genet in ‘The Diary of a Thief’; Pieyre de Mandiargues in ‘La Marge’; Vázquez Montalbán in almost all of his novels about Detective Carvalho; and more recently Maruja Torres in ‘Un calor tan cercano’.

Discover the little that remains of this quarter before it’s too late, since a large part of this cultural legacy will be lost when its last inhabitants pass away; after that books and documentaries will be all that we will have. Today the superheroes of the district, friends of Camarón de la Isla, and fans of Bullfighting (a dying species) still wander the streets. Social phenomena like flamenco that live on, surrounded by the multiculturality that the district transpires nowadays, and which advances relentlessly extinguishing any trace of Maritime Barcelona’s street-life past.