The La Garba bookstore in Barceloneta closed its doors this last Friday of January. Its managers had announced the sad news at the beginning of the year, through a message published on their Instagram account that is worth partially reproducing.
"Symbols are much more important than they seem. Symbols are a fixed photo of what we are, of the essence we preserve. When one of them disappears, we already sense that we lose much more than meets the eye. We do not lose what they are, but what they represent."
Therefore, from La Garba, they are fully aware that its closure has a strong symbolic charge that transcends them. The disappearance of the last bookstore in Barceloneta, La Garba, is part of the process of the disappearance of the city's fishing district as a whole or, in any case, the inexorable death of its soul.
Perhaps some of you will remember that La Garba already closed in 2019, due to the retirement of the previous owner. Also, that at that time, the situation was saved and the business reopened a few months later, thanks to a campaign by the Associació Barceloneta Alerta.
"It is true that La Garba is not much. One cannot get lost for hours among the shelves and tables looking to discover the wonderful book that might change their life. (...) The dimensions of a quarter of a flat give what they give, and in that it represents very well the spirit of the neighborhood in which it lives."
A business, that of La Garba, therefore, modest. A small bookstore, with few titles and, perhaps for this reason, very well chosen, with head and heart, by its managers.
"But La Garba was a mirage. Sooner or later, it was doomed to disappear; as are the few lifelong businesses that still resist, as we know, even if we want to deny the evidence, we know it..., our neighborhood."
Nothing less touristy than a bookstore. A space where you cannot go in a hurry. A business based on the relationship, often of years, between client and bookseller. A business of words that, by force, must be a bulwark in defense of culture, of language, of Catalan. In the case of La Garba, a heroic work that it carried out in a particularly hostile terrain, among restaurants, hostels and surf board rental businesses, where it is surely easier to be served in English, French, Italian or Russian than in the country's own language.
Xevi Noya, bookseller at La Garba, tells me that businesses focused on sun and beach tourism have pushed the price of commercial rents in the neighborhood to impossible levels for a small business like the bookstore. For this reason, after two years of searching for a new location with a more reasonable rent, they have ended up throwing in the towel.
But the closure of La Garba is not only explained by the sky-high rents in Barceloneta. The bookseller explains that in these last days of opening "people from the neighborhood have come in to lament the closure, some of whom had not set foot in the bookstore in these almost five years in which it has been managed by a neighborhood association." In this sense, Xevi concludes: "This neighborhood militancy is quite striking when a reference point is extinguished. These voices that now cry, not all of them, where have they been all this time?" Well, I imagine they were in the same place as the hundreds of Barcelonans who two days ago lamented with great fuss the closure of the Comedia cinema, despite having not set foot in any screening room for years.
The case of La Garba and Barceloneta is by no means exceptional in a city progressively devastated by tourism. Yes, I said "devastated." Of all that was genuine about Barcelona, only the shell tends to be preserved. Its content is emptied, largely because the tourist is only interested in taking photos of the container.
The case of La Garba and Barceloneta is by no means exceptional in a city progressively devastated by tourismIn 2021 I published a satirical novel in which I imagined the future of a Barcelona assaulted by tourist fever, unfortunately not very different from the current one. In Barcelona tomorrow or this afternoon (Columna Edicions, 2023) fantasized about the owners of a historic bookstore in the city center who, tired of only having tourists come in asking to use the bathroom, converted the business into a bookstore-urinal and made a fortune. Time will tell.
La Garba accepts, resignedly, its end, surrounded by a small but loyal clientele with whom, these last few days, it has shared tears and hugs. But it leaves with a warning for sailors:
"(...) others, in time, will realize the importance of this fallen, lost symbol. Night falls over Barceloneta and the neighborhood is lost in the mists of the memory of what it once was."
Bad news for culture, for the Barceloneta neighborhood, and for Barcelona in general.