The night in Barcelona

I grew up when I started coming home at ungodly hours. We lived in the Eixample and I spent long hours conversing in bars, going to the cinema, and walking up and down La Rambla, all the way to Gràcia. The goal was to spend as few hours as possible at home and, in Barcelona, with very long summer nights and neighborhoods with many people until the early hours of the morning, it was easy to move around on foot at night.

Barcelona is not like the suburbs of American cities because most streets are made up of apartment buildings. If we sat in a doorway, there was always a neighbor returning home at night, greeting us and turning on the lights in the porter's lodge. The streets of Barcelona always have five or six floors of balconies, plus the corresponding bars on the corners, and you always see lights on, not counting the streetlights. With all due respect to the series Crims, we do not live in a scenographically terrifying city: the swampy environments of Nordic cities where some of my favorite horror series have been filmed are much more so. I'm not saying there are no crimes, or horrible sexist aggressions, but, in general, Barcelona is a fantastic city to walk around at night.

There are cities that make a flag of the night. Berlin or Amsterdam have an interesting, culturally active, and quite safe nightlife. There is a very significant economic activity linked to nightlife, and it's not all discotheques or seedy places. There is a special program of concerts (what a moment when the lights go out and everyone falls silent), gastronomic (how nice to have dinner with your partner in any unknown and out-of-context place), and social (how many friendships are forged in the tranquility of the night, when the hours pass and knots are untied with restorative conversations). In the city of Rotterdam, they invented the figure of the Nachtburgemeester to better organize nightlife. 

I'm not saying there are no crimes, or horrible sexist aggressions, but, in general, Barcelona is a fantastic city to walk around at night

Encouraging this nocturnal activity can be a good project for a city that has everything that other cities will never be able to dream of: very high densities and streets full of goalposts, terraces and shops that accompany, at night, pedestrians. There are metropolitan cities, such as Santa Coloma or Cornellà, that have recovered the figure of the night watchman, creating jobs with a clear vocation of service to the neighborhood. And let's not forget that, for the majority to enjoy daily routines, there is a large provision of people who work in hospitals, in service networks, in security contingents and in public transport, and that they also benefit from a somewhat more organized nightlife.

We complain that young people spend the day glued to screens, that we buy everything at dawn on digital platforms, and that there are too many acts of vandalism and fights that end in tragedy. But the night, like the day, can be programmed differently, and one can count on people's desire to socialize, to walk and to enjoy others. If we look back, it's only very recently that cities are lit up at night, but they have gained so much! Soon it will be time to turn on the lights of the Department of Night in Barcelona, because the nocturnal has much more potential than the surveys say.