The Ajuntament is pouring funds into keeping Barcelona’s famed meat and produce markets alive. These fresh-food mercats are an important part of the Catalan cultural and historical heritage. While those built on the outskirts of the city in the Sixties and Seventies were the result of population growth thanks to Spanish immigration, many in the city were constructed in the Modernista period. Since 1992, 19 of the city’s 40 markets have been modernised, and another seven are currently in the process.
“They got their beauty from the same craftsmen who later worked on emblematic monuments to the city,” explains Barcelona’s mayor Jordi Hereu, in ‘La Ruta dels Mercats’, a pamphlet guiding tourists through the iconic markets of the city.
“Before newspapers, television and radio existed, they were the places to find out what was going on in the villages, towns and around the world.”
The process of modernising the buildings is long and arduous. Typically, the market is moved in its entirety to a temporary facility housed in gigantic tents, while roofs, pavements and floors are replaced and façades are restored. Once complete, some markets update their services as well as their dwellings: boasting WiFi, home delivery, underground parking, internet and telephone orders, stools for customers who sit and wait to be served, extended opening hours without lunch-time closures and benches for resting shoppers.
In markets like the completely refurbished Concepció, these kinds of strategies seem to have paid off. The Eixample edifice bustles on a Saturday morning, its bars full of men drinking beer and chewing through sandwiches as their wives negotiate shopping trollies through the aisles, while the on-site Caprabo supermarket in the basement is relatively empty. Nevertheless, stall holders agreed that sales during the 2009 Christmas season were sluggish. Unemployment and the crisis took their toll, and elderly shoppers were venturing out less.
Still, Barcelona’s markets have probably gone through rougher times. After all, written evidence of their existence dates back to the end of the 10th century. The renovation process, started in 1992, is an attempt to keep these cultural institutions alive and relevant in an era of hypermarkets and cars. The Barcelona City Council has allocated m138.5 million for this work between 2008 and 2011.
“We’re not doing the buildings just as a question of prestige, or for historical remembrance or things like that,” Jordi William Carnes, Deputy Mayor and president of the Municipal Institute of Markets of Barcelona (IMMB), told Metropolitan. “What we want is to make those buildings economically competitive. We don’t want to have just a building; we want to have an economic instigator.”
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