As my boyfriend and I stand under the Arc de Triomphe in Barcelona, it occurs to us that we may not enjoy the next few hours. We are waiting for Lisa Richardson, a total stranger, to come and take us shopping. This is a surprising thing for us to do — neither of us is a big shopper, he particularly dislikes high street fashion, we don’t have much money to buy things, and we are in Barcelona for only a couple of days, so should perhaps be following the other tourists to the Gaudi houses or into the Picasso museum.
But we are not, because we’ve decided to take a chance on an incredibly personalized type of tour, one in which a local tailors a tour of their city to your own specifications, using their knowledge to show you the kinds of things you just can’t find in a guide book — an idea that is spreading all over the world. You can now buy the services of a trendy local in just about any city you choose to take a break in, and we’ve asked Richardson to come up with a tour that’s heavy on vintage and second-hand clothes as well as furniture.
We found her online through the company that owns the apartment we are staying in, an airy, bare-bricked art deco studio furnished in one-off modernist pieces, with a balcony overlooking a quiet, pretty alleyway, just a stone’s throw away from the bars and restaurants of Passeig del Born. (The furniture is actually so special that the owners leave you a little note with instructions about how not to damage it — we spend the weekend nervously spreading out tea towels before putting any drinks down.)
The guides can also set up foodie tours, taking you to out-of-the-way tapas bars and food shops or just the famous Boqueria food market, or even a tour on which you buy your ingredients in town and are taught how to cook them in your apartment. Also on offer are wine tours and haute couture fashion tours, or there’s Barcelona by Night, a crawl through bars and traditional cabaret shows.
It’s the Internet that has made all this possible. Couchsurfing.org arguably started the trend when it launched in 2004, with the aim of helping cash-strapped travelers stay with locals. It has since grown into an international network with members in 62,000 cities.
The expectation now is that members show their guests around their cities and introduce them to their friends. In return, surfers do the same for people coming to visit their own hometowns. The site allows couch-surfers to describe their interests and post profiles to ensure they are matched with like-minded people.
Facebook is home to lots of city tours run by locals — in places such as Rio de Janeiro, Milan and New York. Most are free, including the excellent daily New Rome Free Tour (newromefreetour.com). Another great site is blacktomato.co.uk, currently offering a tour of Venice in a kayak and an insider’s day in Bucharest. You could also take a look at the Global Greeter Network (globalgreeternetwork.info), which is a coalition of volunteer guides in cities from Lyon to Melbourne.
These are not the kinds of tours where you follow a retired historian grasping a large umbrella. The point is to experience the city as a local. There’s no faffing about with tourist-office maps if you’re following someone who knows where he or she is going. Plus, most of the people who take on this kind of guiding are either volunteers or doing it as a sideline job — Richardson used to work in fashion in Milan, and still does style consultancy and trend forecasting. In fact, she decided to start her guiding company because so many acquaintances visiting Barcelona would e-mail her asking where the best shoe shops were, or how to find the best antique furniture.
Richardson has lived in Barcelona for a few years and is very cool (but also very nice), so she is just the kind of person you’d want to show you around town. We go for coffee in a tiny, very quiet square a few minutes’ walk away, a shop she likes because there are never any tourists there. Over drinks, she runs through her plans for our day, which will involve shops in the Borne area of Barcelona, to the east of the heaving Ramblas: it’s less well known and a little more genteel than the lively, noisy and chaotic Ravel area to the west, where we will finish the day.
She has spent the preceding week calling up shop-owners to make sure they will be open for us — away from the main roads, Barcelona’s businesspeople seem to have an idiosyncratic approach to opening times, which is to say they open when they feel like it. So, naturally enough, the first antiques shop she takes us to is closed.
Richardson is unsurprised and unperturbed, and we instead move on to a tiny shop called Zaoum, which is run by a woman who also teaches jewelry-making. I immediately fall in love with a set of Bakelite bangles, an enormous navy blue hat, a collection of 1940s crystal glasses encased in miniature baskets for picnics and a set of small sailing boats. My boyfriend reminds me that with Easyjet’s stingy baggage allowance, we cannot buy everything. I buy the boats.
We wind our way on through the Borne, which is made up of numerous little old streets, most too narrow for cars and almost identical — washing hanging from windows, small bakeries and cafes dotted about, and impossible to navigate without someone who knows where he or she is going. We pop out at Ivo & Co, a shop selling faux-vintage homeware. From there we go on to a couple of posh boutiques, Nunita, which is hopelessly expensive, and Coquette, which is having a sale. I try on several Chloe dresses and try to convince myself that if I don’t eat for a month, I could both fit into one of them and afford it.
Next is one of Richardson’s favorites, El Changuito, which is one of those stylishly cluttered shops that makes you wish you had thought of putting wooden animals along the tops of your picture frames.
Highlights included a fabulous collection of old prescription glasses and some silver powder compacts. Then we visit Iriarte Iriarte, a new shop where beautiful leather goods are made and sold by two young designers, something Richardson is keen we take note of, because for all the efforts Barcelona’s town planners have put into resisting the homogenization of their streets, it’s still unusual for young people to take up traditional trades. It seems amazing that they, or indeed any of the artisans in these minute shops on deserted alleys, make any money at all, so purely in the spirit of supporting their endeavors, I buy a pair of their gorgeous leather brogues.
The Old Curiosity shop is next, a dark treasure trove of antiquey stuff, and then we cross the Ramblas — quickly, because it’s crowded and horrible — and head towards the cathedral, where we visit Anomorfosis, which belongs to a man who collects industrial and scientific antiques, his wares ranging from old cameras to ancient-looking microscopes and cassette tapes. Then it’s on to a nearby poster and print shop, stacked from floor to ceiling with old cartoons, magazine covers and film posters.
For the final part of the tour we head into the Ravel for some serious vintage fashion: Ravel is home to a whole road of vintage clothes shops, Calle Riera Baixa. We make for Le Swing, a brilliantly over-the-top store selling gigantic platform heels, knackered old designer handbags, hats with veils and rows and rows of suits and dresses.
After that we have just enough time to have a quick look in Wilde, a vintage sunglasses shop, before collapsing over a cold cerveza. Naturally enough, Richardson takes us to a bar bang in the middle of the teeming Ravel, a spot which barely any tourist could find — Galeria La Capella De L’Antic Hospital de la Santa Creu on Calle de l’Hospital — a quiet and pretty open-air cafe in a garden in the middle of an old chapel that is now an art gallery.
There are several reasons why taking a tour with a local like Richardson is a great idea: they know places you would never find otherwise, and if, like us, you are trying to avoid other tourists, the situation is perfect because a local in any touristy city will be well-practiced in staying away from visitors.
Local guides are also enthusiastic — it’s “their” city and they want to show it off, so you get much more than you would if you were (heaven forbid) cruising about on an open-top bus, or even part of a large guided group. Plus, you get a real sense of the place — we had both been to Barcelona before and, if it hadn’t been for a wedding nearby, we would never have bothered coming again, since after seeing Sagrada Familia, the Gaudi houses, and the Picasso and Dali museums we thought we had done it all. However, we soon discovered a genuinely cool, edgy city full of friendly artistic people and quirky, interesting businesses.
Once she saw that we had a passion for collecting odd vintage bits and pieces, Richardson told us about a great flea market, Mercat del Encants, which we visited two days later. She gave us her recommendations for some fantastic hidden away bars to visit that night, including Big Bang Bar (bigbangbcn.net), which has no visible signage apart from a bright light above the door, and which plays brilliant, mostly live, gypsy-swing, jazz and folk music, as well as serving lethal drinks.
She also pointed us in the direction of two excellent cheap restaurants: one was the bustling Can Resolis, in Ravel, where you can get family-style plates of patatas bravas, meatballs and mussels, and linger over good-value local red wine. The other was Au Port de la Lune, a determinedly French restaurant next to the Boqueria, which does a three-course set menu for 15 euros (about US$22), including herring salad, delicious pates and cheeses, and bull steak, which sounds terrible but is actually unctuously rich and meaty. Cheeringly, they have a large painted sign on the wall that translates, “We don’t have Diet Coke, we don’t have Coca Cola, we don’t have ketchup, and we never will.”
So, even though our time with Richardson was short, we benefited from her expertise the entire weekend.
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