The Disneyfication of Barcelona

[SOUND OF PEOPLE TALKING]

TOURIST 1: We are in the famous market, next to Las Ramblas in Barcelona.
ALAN RUÍZ-TEROL, PRODUCER: What’s the name of the market?
TOURIST 2: Mercado!
TOURIST 1: No, Boca?
ART: La Boquería.
TOURIST 1: Boquería, Boquería! (Laughter)

[MUSIC]

TARIRO MZEZEWA, HOST: In the heart of Barcelona, Spain, you’ll find a world-class food market that’s been around since the 13th century. More than 200 vendors spread across 30,000 square feet hold generations of expertise on foraging, fishmongering, and butchery. But, as our producer Alan Ruíz Terol learned, La Boquería is changing.

ART: By being there and, like, just spending, like, a few minutes walking around, I realized this is not what a fresh food market looks like in Barcelona, in Catalonia, in Spain.

TM: Unique foods that people would take home to prepare have been replaced with take-away bites wrapped in plastic, to be consumed on the go.

ART: In a way, like, I was shocked, because it felt that the majority of the stalls were for tourists. You had, like, pizza slices, guacamole, like, the oysters.

TM: As tourists have overwhelmed La Boquería, it’s become something of a caricature of itself.

ART: This idea of being in a zoo, you know? But of being, like, the setting in a movie? How do you, I don’t know how, how to say that in English, but, like, to be in this movie made, like, for the tourists. Like, for them to experience what a real Barcelona market is.

TM: Professor José Mansilla has seen these changes happen to Barcelona over many years. There’s actually a name for it.

JOSÉ MANSILLA: Disneyfication is a process that happens sometimes where a city is transformed into some kind of park, like Disney World, these kind of places. So, it’s the idea of taking up a place like a city, a neighborhood, or a couple of streets, or whatever, and control all the aspects from the, you know, the cleanliness of the street, the sound of music, that sounds, the lights.

TM: This Disneyfication isn’t just happening at La Boquería but in Barcelona as a whole. It’s emptying the city of its essence.

JM: At the end what you have there is just a place that is very, it’s cute, it’s nice, it’s clean, but you are not going to find life, because it’s death. Nobody is living there.

[THEME MUSIC]

TM: From WHYY, this is Peak Travel. I’m your host, Tariro Mzezewa. In this episode, we’re going to walk the famous aisles of La Boquería, searching for the real Barcelona. We’ll learn what is so frustrating about tourism for generations of merchants, why this evolution was embraced in the first place, and how some think the city could hold onto its culture.

That’s coming up, on Peak Travel.

[MIDROLL BREAK]

[MUSIC]

TM: Welcome back to Peak Travel. I’m Tariro Mzezewa.

[SOUND OF PEOPLE TALKING]

OSCAR UBIDE: We are located in the, in the center of Las Ramblas. Then a lot of people are visiting us.

TM: Even Oscar Ubide, the general manager of La Boquería, is impressed by the number of visitors the market receives every year.

OU: And we have about, almost 20 million a year. So it represents about 70,000 people every day. So, it’s like the football stadium of Barcelona full every day here in the market.

TM: He’s noticed that, increasingly, demand is coming less from locals and more from tourists.

OU: Because of the customers, I mean, not maybe about the number, but yes, about the typology of customers. We used to be the central market of the citizens of Barcelona. Now we are more a touristic market.

TM: Oscar insists that the traditional attractions of the market are still relevant.

[MUSIC]

OU: Of course for the local people, the main activity of the market continues being the fishmongers. I think that the fish island of La Boquería is probably the biggest in Europe.

TM: But even old-school merchants are aware that the interests of their customers are changing.

[SOUND OF PEOPLE SPEAKING IN CATALAN]

TM: Puri Albiol Adell has been walking the aisles of La Boquería for as long as she can remember.

PURI ALBIOL ADELL [TRANSLATED FROM CATALÁN]: I’ve known four generations from here. I mean, imagine, since I was little.

TM: She’s resisting the urge to cheapen her craft for the new customers.

PAA: I am more traditional, and still sell the best fish I find, and at the best price, but, yes, there are two or three of us left. The rest is very oriented towards tourism, because it pays well.

TM: The stalls that have pivoted to offering to-go foods are making more money. To some sellers, this can cause a great deal of aggravation.

ART: Of all the stall owners that I talked to, Xavi Petrás was by far the one who was, like, more angry. Like, he was just, like, so mad at what the market had become.

XAVI PETRÁS [TRANSLATED FROM CATALÁN]: I’m Xavi Petrás. I’m the third generation of the business, the second one installed at La Boquería, mainly selling mushrooms, truffles, and specialties. We try to work with high gastronomy produce.

TM: It’s an especially busy time of year for Xavi.

ART: It was like the peak season for him and there were, like, these mushrooms, like, different shapes, different colors. It makes sense that he would pride himself, because mushrooms are an integral part of Catalan cuisine.

TM: And he’s tired of tourist groups ogling his stall.

XP: Tour guides come, telling stories about my stall, even about who comes to buy here, and I would kick them out or even report them if I could. But I can’t.

TM: He’s not sure his high standards for produce matter the way they once did.

XP: Well, we have, I have experienced it fully, more than my father, right? More than my father, I have fully experienced the pure devolution of La Boquería, from a reference market for high gastronomy products, to what it is now, which is can turista. That’s what it is now. So, a stall like mine here no longer makes any sense, right? In fact, in a year, we will reconvert it, devolving the business to what this market wants now, unfortunately.

[MUSIC]

TM: Visitors see the stall as just another stop on a tour.

XP: Tourists are curious, right? Tourists devour information. They devour total nonsense, as I like to say. Right, tourists ask me the price of truffles 50 times a day, never to buy. Exactly, never to buy. 50, 100 times a day, I have to tell them the price of truffles. “Ah, OK, OK, OK!” They go away.

TM: Xavi says the tourists are more than a nuisance. They’re also driving away real business.

XP: I have all the tourists touching everything, taking pictures, blocking my stall. Sometimes a local comes to buy, and the stall is blocked by tourists taking pictures. And what happens? There are constant clashes.

TM: Earlier this year, Barcelona banned tourists from touching and taking pictures of food at the market.

[SOUND OF XAVI SPEAKING TO A CUSTOMER]

Even so, the city continues to be overwhelmed by tourism. Just this summer, thousands of people marched through Barcelona, protesting the visitors and spraying them with water guns. Because of the revenue they bring, it’s becoming hard for Xavi to resist the temptation to cater to tourists.

XP: What do we have to do here? Well, adapt the stall. Is what we’re planning to do a downgrade? No, but is it in terms of the love and affection that I have for the produce? Yes.

TM: And Xavi says stopping by La Boquería when you’re in town isn’t worth it anymore.

XP: Before it was cool. Before it was spectacular. Now it is not.

[MUSIC]

TM: Next on Peak Travel, the event that catalyzed the tourist boom in Barcelona.

[MIDROLL BREAK]

[MUSIC]

TM: This is Peak Travel. I’m your host, Tariro Mzezewa.

[SOUND UP FROM 1992 OLYMPICS PROMO]

ANNOUNCER [SINGING]: Free as a bird, up with the sun, each morning you’re out there to be number one. And we are one.

ANNOUNCER 2: The Summer Olympics are coming to NBC.

MATT GOULDING: You had the ’92 Olympics, which everybody, I think, remembers as being an incredibly successful sort of showcase, not just of sport, but of Barcelona’s sort of Mediterranean sexiness.

TM: Matt Goulding has lived in Barcelona for over a decade. He’s written extensively about Catalan culture, including the changes at La Boquería. He says locals see the ‘92 Olympics as a turning point in the city’s history, one that marks the first wave of this Disneyfication process.

[MUSIC]

MG: You know, it became an extraordinary marketing campaign for Barcelona. Everyone could imagine the diver going off the big diving board there on Montjuïc with La Sagrada Familia in the background.

TM: Matt says this was when the city first opened up to outside cultural influence.

MG: The ’92 Olympics were, in some ways, the most American of Olympics, if that makes sense. I think specifically because of the presence of the Dream Team.

[SOUND UP OF ANNOUNCER NAMING THE DREAM TEAM]

ANNOUNCER: A rousing ovation for a group that many refer to as the Dream Team…

MG: And how gigantic that was culturally, athletically, it kind of had its own center of gravity in the Olympics and, you know, to see Michael Jordan…

ANNOUNCER [SPEAKING IN CATALÁN]: Number nine, Michael Jordan…

ANNOUNCER: Number 14, Charles Barkley…

MG: And Charles Barkley…

ANNOUNCER: Number six, Patrick Ewing…

MG: Patrick Ewing… being embraced by the world in a way that we hadn’t really seen gigantic, larger-than-life athletes on that stage, in that way before.

TM: The Olympics came at an important turning point in Spain’s history. The country was in the early stages of its democracy, having just come out of four decades of dictatorship.

ART: In historical terms, democratic Spain was new. In the 1970s, Spain went from being ruled by Francisco Franco to transitioning to democracy. Years later, they entered the European Union. So Spain had been, like, in this process of, like, becoming, like, a democratic, European country and then, like, in 1992, you have, like, the bang!

[SOUND OF STARTING GUN AND PEOPLE CHEERING]

Barcelona hosts the Summer Olympics and it’s like, we’re ready. We feel like “Oh!” Like, we were the center of the world in a way. And that became, like, this foundational moment for modern-day Barcelona. And most people say, like, that’s when Barcelona in a way invited this mass tourism to come to the city.

TM: With mass tourism and the Olympics came powerful, corporate interests.

MG: Now, of course, the reality on the ground that what came out of that were the inroads for those large international brands, specifically American brands being the McDonald’s and Burger Kings and the Kentucky Fried Chickens, Coca Colas, you name it, sort of finding a foothold in the central part of Barcelona. And, to this day, that foothold, which I think really can be traced back to that period of time, has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. You go to the Boquería now, and when you walk in, on your left side, the first thing you see is Dunkin Donuts. The second thing you see is a Starbucks.

[MUSIC]

TM: And as Barcelona became a popular destination for travelers from all over the world, tourism went from being a novelty to something much bigger.

JM: The institutions, the politicians in charge were using this transformation of the city in order to reshape the economy of the city. We say in Spanish, and I am going to try to translate, “to put all the eggs in the same basket,” that means the main bet, right? So you put all these eggs in the same basket, and this basket is tourism.

TM: Jose says this process drained Barcelona of what made it unique.

JM: I talk about the life of the streets, the life with the people in the street, in the squares. The people meeting each other, just because they are always in the same bar, taking the coffee every morning, or where they go to see the football match, and these kinds of things. I mean, if the people are not together, if they don’t have places to talk about what’s happening to them, people can not exchange their opinion. At the end, they don’t create social fabric. For me, the biggest loss in what’s happening, about what’s happening in Barcelona is precisely that we are losing our character as people from Barcelona.

TM: Oscar Ubide, the general manager of La Boquería, says the romanticism and nostalgia around the old-world market can go too far.

OU: When people ask about the traditional market, which is exactly the traditional market? The market of the middle age? Or the market of the ‘70s? Or the market of 20 years ago? I mean, the market, it’s alive. And then it’s changing as the world is changing.

TM: For sellers, it’s normal to adapt.

OU: This is a jungle. Not La Boquería. The world is a jungle, then only the hard people will survive.

TM: Still, Matt thinks there are simple steps to be taken to help preserve the history of the city, and keep the Disneyfication at bay.

MG: If you’re a local city government and you’re at city hall, and you’re handing out liquor licenses in Poblenou in Barcelona, you know, they manage these things extremely carefully. There’s an incredible bureaucracy to be able to secure a liquor license on one city block, because they only give out one per city block in this particular neighborhood. That type of policy has, for better or worse, been very well preserved when it comes to restaurants and bars, for example. Why isn’t there a similar policy when it comes to souvenir shops? Why isn’t there a similar policy when it comes to bike rental shops? Why couldn’t you put into place something along those lines that still leaves enough, sort of, free market energy that neighborhoods can take their own shape, but that prevents an entire city center from becoming monochromatic, essentially. All of the color and all of the life has been sucked out of the center of Barcelona because there’s been nothing in place to protect it.

TM: Without safeguards, locals can be reduced to props for tourists.

MG: You feel like you are sort of a character in an amusement park, that Barcelona has become a bit of an amusement park.

TM: Policy is important, but another way to preserve the authenticity of the city is by being more thoughtful about how we visit.

MG: It’s slow culture versus fast culture. We want the bright, shiny thing that’s in front of us, and not necessarily want to take the time to really understand the nuances of a place that we’ve traveled to, which, if you really think about it, you know, you spend an extraordinary amount of time and effort and money to get to Barcelona. You owe it to yourself to just go that extra step, to actually taste Barcelona, to actually see Barcelona, and to actually listen to Barcelona. And I think we all know that you can’t taste, and see, and listen to Barcelona from the comfort of a chair in Starbucks.

TM: Jose says that tourism in Barcelona isn’t going to stop, but it should be geared toward the people who live in the city. He wrote an article last year detailing the changes he’d like to see from the industry.

JM: We have to think in a more local way, not bringing people from North America, for instance. I mean, it’s like, and it’s insane that we are thinking even in bringing people from other places in the world and so far as the USA, I mean it’s, like, it’s crazy. So what we’re seeing is, if we want to have tourists, we can have it, but close to our houses, close to our homes.

[SOUND OF PEOPLE CHATTING]

[MUSIC]

TM: For now though, merchants like Xavi at La Boquería will have to give the tourists what they want.

XP: No, It doesn’t end. Here, we will be. Here, the stall will still be ours, only that we will sell other things, and that’s it. Nothing ends. On the contrary, it evolves. So, we are just beginning.

TM: And the famous Catalan market will offer fewer hand-foraged mushrooms, and more to-go smoothies.

XP: The beautiful stall at La Boquería and such no longer makes any sense, right? But, well, it doesn’t mean that the new one will be ugly. But if I have to sell things to take away, which is what I’ve been criticizing for 15 years, well, now I will.

[THEME MUSIC]

TM: Next time, on Peak Travel… Nashville has been taken over by a new kind of visitor.

BACHELORETTE 1: This bach party was brought to you by….
BACHELORETTE 2: My probation expiration!
BACHELORETTE 3: My nip slip!
BACHELORETTE 4: Tequila shots!

TM: Bachelorettes and their friends, flocking to the city for a weekend to celebrate their upcoming weddings.

MAN ON THE STREET: Bachelorettes are like the people that go door to door selling magazine subscriptions. Once you open the door, it’s really hard to get them to leave.

TM: But are the bachelorettes really that bad?

TOM MORALES: The bachelorettes, I mean, they’re a group of ten, 12 girls that are there to get… you know, they’re not the problem.

TM: That’s next time, on Peak Travel.

This is Peak Travel. I’m your host, Tariro Mzezewa.

Our executive producer is Tom Grahsler. Our senior producer is Michael Olcott. Our producer is Michaela Winberg, and our associate producer is Bibiana Correa. We had production help on this episode from Alan Ruíz Terol.

Our editor is Meg Driscoll. Original music, mixing, and sound design by Catherine Anderson. Engineering by Al Banks, Charlie Kaier, Diana Martinez, and Mike Villers. Our tile art was created by Nick Rogacki.

Special thanks to the voice actors who helped bring this episode to life: Rosor Foret and Ramesh Mahtani.

Peak Travel is a production of WHYY, distributed by PRX, and part of the NPR podcast network. Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, the iHeart Radio app — or wherever you get your podcasts.

Executive Producer: Tom Grahsler
Senior Producer: Michael Olcott
Producer: Michaela Winberg
Associate Producer: Bibiana Correa
Additional Production: Alan Ruiz Terol
Editor: Meg Driscoll
Original Music, Mixing, and Sound Design: Catherine Anderson
Engineers: Al Banks, Charlie Kaier, Diana Martinez, and Mike Villers
Tile Art: Nick Rogacki

Special thanks to the voice actors who helped bring this episode to life: Rosor Foret and Ramesh Mahtani.

Peak Travel is a production of WHYY, distributed by PRX, and part of the NPR podcast network.