While in Barcelona an American friend and I spent an evening with a Barcelona native, Julia, enjoying a trip4real tour of the Gracia district’s tapas bars. This neighborhood is popular with locals but not (yet) very much seen by tourists. In fact on my 10 day visit to this city last year I never ventured into Gracia beyond the main boulevard that features famous architecture by Gaudí and others. I was delighted to discover the narrow streets and beautiful old buildings in Gracia, interspersed with small shops featuring local artists and designers. We wandered into one pop up shop selling off gear used on movie sets, past the only local theater that doesn’t dub the films, and of course past many bars and bread shops, and under plenty of Catalan flags hanging from balconies along the way.
Gracia neighborhood featuring pro-independence Catalan flag
After a short walk through the colorful neighborhood streets we arrived at our first stop, a public square ringed with tapas bars filled with people sitting at outside tables by the heating lamps on this brisk Saturday night. There we found a table and enjoyed a caña (small glass of beer) with a few classic tapas: papas bravas (fried potatoes with a spicy mayo-based sauce) and bombas (literally, bombs, consisting of mashed potatoes filled with ground meat, breaded and fried and then covered with a savory tomato-based sauce.) These were not light tapas, but we wanted to sample a few classics that we hadn’t yet enjoyed on our Barcelona visit.
Bomba
Over food and drinks we learned about the bilingual experience of all people in Catalonia, where Catalan is spoken and taught alongside Spanish, and conversations move fluidly between the two languages. We swapped travel stories and knowledge about various destinations that we and our host have visited and want to visit. And we learned more about the foods typical of Barcelona.
Our second stop was a classic bar that displayed casks of its own drinks, bottles of which were for sale. Here we enjoyed some Spanish wine and a plate of fuet, a hard salami local to Barcelona. While I had sampled fuet on my previous trip, it was alongside other meats from Spain and I hadn’t realized how important this specific meat was to locals in this city. Julia explained how much she missed fuet when living in London for a few months. And I noticed that every table in the bar had a dish of fuet along with various other tapas.
My friend and I were particularly curious about how the Spanish can eat so many tapas at bars in the evening during what we consider dinner time (7pm) and then move on to have dinner just a few hours later. We learned that tapas are just food one eats in order to be able to enjoy some drinks without getting drunk, and they’re not meant to be super filling. Many people will go out for tapas and drinks with friends and then go home to have dinner later.
Fuet
Our local explained how she got involved in Trip4Real, first as a substitute guide for a friend who had an emergency and asked her to fill in. She spent the entire day before that first bar tour doing research to set up a memorable experience for her traveler. After that worked out successfully Julia ended up offering that tour herself, along with a few other options.
While my friend did pay for his tour, trip4real graciously sent me on this tour for free. The experience of spending an evening with a local, learning about Spanish culture and history while visiting bars that had only locals among the other patrons was certainly something we could never have found in a mainstream tour. This experience underscored for me the vision of peer-to-peer activity services. Helping travelers to enjoy a deeper and more connected version of the city they are visiting.
Read more about trip4real in my recent interview of founder and CEO Gloria Molins.