LIVING

The ensuing coverage painted a picture of the Ramblas as a place robbed of its former glory, now crawling with prostitutes, thieves and drug dealers. Yet, to anyone who has lived here long, it is surprising to read allegations that Barcelona’s most famous street is somehow worse than ever. Prostitution, drugs and thievery—in symbiosis with tourism—have formed the bedrock of Raval society for a long time.

Since the 18th century, city officials have periodically declared that immorality was rampant in the streets. At the beginning of the 20th century, Ciutat Vella was virtually a shanty-town, with people living on the streets, in hallways and on rooftops. In Jean Genet’s semi-autobiographical The Thief’s Journal, he wrote that the Raval of the Thirties was full of “whores, thieves, pimps and beggars.” Cocaine and marijuana have always been available. Hashish made its debut on the scene in the Fifties while morphine and opium were eventually eclipsed in the Seventies by heroin. Up until the Eighties, battling drug gangs and murders—even and sometimes especially on the Ramblas—were part and parcel of the landscape.

Rafael Jiménez, an inspector with the Cuerpo Nacional de Policia (CNP), told Metropolitan that the situation regarding theft and drugs is virtually unchanged, and that the Ramblas is relatively safe. “Compared to the Eighties and Nineties, I believe that the offences committed are the same. Thefts like pickpocketing and bag-snatching. That’s basically it. There’s some trafficking, small quantities of hashish, cocaine. But there were more drugs a few years ago than there are now.”

So what, if anything, is different now about the Ramblas and its surrounding environs? That all depends on whom you ask. “The situation is definitely worse than before,” said Khalid Hussein, manager of Bloomsday Pub, on the lower Ramblas. “There are more robberies, more prostitutes. Just a few nights ago, there was a knife fight across the street.”

Merchants operating around the pillars of the Boqueria claimed that the area and the Ramblas, as a whole, have dramatically declined. These stallholders—all of whom have worked in the iconic market for between 32 and 50 years—each recalled how the Ramblas was once a refined place, where families would stroll in their most elegant clothing, free from molestation.