What Opened on Carrer de la Providència (And What It Replaced)

There is a new bar on Carrer de la Providència. I’ve walked past it three times in the past week. The first time I thought it was still being fitted out. The second time it was open. The third time I looked through the window long enough to read the cocktail menu board, and the prices confirmed what the exposed brick and the Edison bulbs had already told me.

Fourteen euros for a cocktail. In Gràcia. On a street that, when I was growing up, had a locutorio where the man from Ecuador called home every Sunday, and a hardware shop where my father bought screws for thirty years, and a couple of places that were just bars — unremarkable, reliable, there because the neighbourhood needed them.

The locutorio closed in 2019. The hardware shop lasted until 2022. I don’t know exactly when the formula for what replaces them became this predictable, but here it is again: exposed brick, craft cocktails, a name with no article, a target customer who does not live in this neighbourhood and has enough disposable income that fourteen euros for a drink does not require a decision.

I want to be fair about this. The bar looks well-executed. The design is competent. The people inside on a Tuesday evening were having a good time. None of that is the problem.

The problem — if you want to call it that, and I do — is the sequence. It’s not that one bar opened. It’s that the locutorio went, then the hardware shop went, then this opened. That sequence is not coincidental. It’s the visible part of something structural: the neighbourhood becoming more expensive to operate in, which means the businesses that serve the people who actually live here cannot stay, and the businesses that open instead serve the people who are moving in, which makes the neighbourhood more expensive for the next round of businesses, and so on.

Gràcia still has more of the real version than most Barcelona neighbourhoods. Plaça del Sol (Plaça del Sol, Gràcia) is still Plaça del Sol — the same mix of people, the same noise, the same sense of a neighbourhood that is not performing itself for anyone. Carrer de Verdi (Carrer de Verdi, Gràcia) still has the cinema and the second-hand bookshops and the bar my parents have been going to since before I was born. These things exist and matter and I am not writing them off.

But Carrer de la Providència now has a €14 cocktail bar where a locutorio used to be. I walked past a third time and I went home and I wrote this instead of going in. That felt like the honest response.