L’Eixample: A Tale of Two Barcelonas
L’Eixample (pronounced lie-sham-pla) is not the Barcelona neighborhood you’ll find on postcards, but it is, in many ways, the neighborhood most emblematic of the city’s current day atmosphere.
The neighborhood spreads across the center of the city in between the mountain and the sea, and gets cut off by most of the city’s major thoroughfares, like the avenida diagonal and passeig de sant joan.
In fact, the word, “l’eixample” means “the widening,” in reference to its breadth across the city. The neigborhood provides a combination of the centrality and ease-of-travel of Midtown, with the chic, bustling environment of the East Village. When you find out that “Barcelona is a grid,” this is the neighborhood people are talking about.
To call l’eixample a grid is sort of correct, but they’re not strict rectangular blocks; they’re octagons. Every corner of each block is sliced off, which makes outdoor dining more practical, at the expense of making walking inefficient. (They have major streets like Gran Via which are ideal for pedestrians instead.)
It’s at the side of one of these octagons, the intersection of Carrer d’Ausias Marc and Carrer Girona, where you can see a microcosm of Barcelona in the summer.
On one side of the block, there are two cafes on each side of an octagon, 20 feet away from each other.“Rosebelle Cafe” and “Bar Altamira” are both, more or less, coffee shops, they but they appeal to completely different crowds.
Rosebelle had a bright red sign, a chalkboard in the street that listed its 7 different kinds of freshly-squeezed juices, and a display of elaborate quiches and pastries that you could see from the street.
Before 11am, Rosebelle and its red sign glows in peace, with a scattering of a few people grabbing their morning coffee and pastries. After 11am, however, is when the “guiri” — the disparaging word for tourists — make their way onto the street and flood into Rosebelle.
Soon, Rosebelle becomes a sea of US college students, along with English, Italian, and French tourists.
A few scurried steps away — close enough that Rosebelle’s wifi still reached it — another bar, Bar Altamira, has already had its busiest hours. In the morning Altamira is crowded with locals, sitting with their coffee and cigarette, enjoying the last breath of freedom (and the kick of caffeine and nicotine) before starting their workday. It opens before the crack of business-as-usual, and closes after lunch time.
They served no quiches, no juices, no matcha. They had bocatas, coffee, and beer. It’s the type of place where its regulars don’t even know its name. Rather, it’s just “the sandwich shop” or “the coffee shop around the block.”
In Altamira, you’ll hear about Barcelona’s housing crisis, the new law that electricity costs more before 10pm on weekdays, and its patrons’ stresses both at work and in life. Between the customers and the waiters, who I never saw take a day off except Sundays, Spanish and Catalan dance in and out like a well-rehearsed tango, without pause, or often thought, of which language to use.
At lunch time, when both places were busy, two places so close together still felt worlds apart.
One day this summer, I sat in Rosebelle and enjoyed an orange-carrot juice. I overheard a young man at the table next to me say in a markedly Californian accent, “They don’t have Yerba Mate here in Spain so I’m surviving off of Coke.”
It was my cue to leave. It was time for a bocata and a copa over at Altamira.
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