Any Barcelonian who treks through Ciutat Vella will have noticed the massive proliferation of small massage and manicure establishments, generally run by Asian fellow citizens and advertised only in English (the latter shows the undeniable success of the work of our City Council's brand new Commissioner for the Social Use of Catalan). The linguistic infraction could be logical; inside you will only see some tourists lying in an armchair feigning ecstasy, while a poor lady massages their feet.
About a couple of years ago, right in front of my house (in the shadow of the statuette of Santa Eulàlia), one of these stalls opened; my condition as a freelancer, which condemns you to constant hiking, means that I have to go in and out of the den many times and, as happens in most of these establishments, the clientele was non-existent and its workers spent the day looking at their mobile phones. As expected, the shop ended up closing, although - while announcing its transfer - a suspiciously twin-aesthetic hairdresser opened in the building opposite, into which, again, I have only seen one or two clients enter per week.
Barcelonians are not alien to conspiracies and, in cases like the ones I describe, this phenomenon does not help much to stop speculating about the supposedly mafia origin of such a perverse dynamic. The main unknown of all this lies in knowing the specific price of the transfer of a local of this type in the neighborhood (Sam Altman and co.'s invention tells me that it can range between 30,000 and 117,000 euros, depending on the surface area and the overcrowding of the street where it is installed) and, secondly, also in finding out why this type of business has had such an exponential growth, which cannot be the result of chance. Be that as it may, and brother-in-law prejudices aside, one can agree with the undeniable fact that these stalls depersonalize (even more!) the neighborhood and do not bring any kind of innovation, personality or generation of trust. I perfectly understand that our tourists, after having seen seventy churches and having eaten authentically vomit-inducing tapas, strive for someone to comfort their hooves; but the image these places offer is nauseating.
A week ago we were talking about the unknown presented by the City Council's plan to preserve the heritage shops in the center of Barcelona (I'm glad that the Falgueras family from Can Gelida, in the recent La Mercè proclamation, reminded, as I did, that the best way to save ancestral establishments is to buy from them!!!). To all this, we should now add the proliferation of this type of fast stores that do not help in the creation of a commerce with more coherence towards the economic history of our city.
Parallel to the proliferation of tacky massages, in places in the neighborhood like Carrer Carders (which had been one of the most beautiful in the entire Gothic Quarter), we must add a new species of ghost shops that tend to focus on a very specific culinary product such as tiramisu or empanadas. I will not deny that some of these products are delicious, but it should be remembered that Barcelona is a Mediterranean city; the beings of this tribe do not make single dishes, nor do we eat standing in the street, like beasts, but rather we like to do it seated and at a table in conversation...
All this may seem like nitpicking but, by constantly giving in to these trifles, we increasingly have a neighborhood and a city that is more reified, comparable to any (ugly) place in the world and, what is more worrying, promoting an unhealthy life alien to the tribal values of our agonizing Europe. I doubt that the administrations have enough sensitivity and street-level life to amend this trend and I am increasingly of the opinion that we will have to recover Barcelona ourselves, with a lot of work... and above all a lot of intransigence. And whoever wants a fucking massage, please go to the physiotherapist. Excuse the tone, but I hate having to write prototypical articles of a middle-aged columnist for La Vanguardia.