BARCELONA

Entertainment:

With its strong Mediterranean character, Barcelona is a city with an abundance of leisure activity and considerable public participation.The people of Barcelona use their free time to stroll in its parks, play on its beaches, visit its exhibition rooms and meet in its cafés.

The city's intense associative life also contributes to enriching its inhabitants' leisure time. Night-time is when the people of Barcelona most participate in the city's leisure activities, attending concerts and theatrical productions and filling the restaurants, music bars and discotheques.

 Shopping:

Barcelona has a wide and varied range of shops for all tastes and budgets. Known for its excellent personal customer service, the city has become a magnet for shoppers and traders alike making it a very attractive place to shop. The Rambla, the Ribera, Plaça de Catalunya, Passeig de Gràcia, Diagonal and the numerous shopping centres scattered round the city and its suburban areas attract a large part of the shoppers. But throughout the city one finds many lesser known shopping streets and neighbourhood shops, besides the city markets and street fairs, where one can buy all sorts of items at a fair price.

Theatre, Art & Culture:

On the city's agenda in the coming months is an eclectic choice of entertainment, we have listed some suggestions:

• New version of the "Nutcracker" at the Tivoli
• Exhibition of Catalan Romanesque sculpture at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC).
• Anton Chekov's The Three Sisters Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (TNC)
• Don Quixote in music at the Auditori
• Operas at the Liceu
• Cirque du Soleil "Dralion" show at Barcelona Port
• Picasso Museum of Barcelona (over 3,500 permanent works)

The visual arts are physically present in the city in the form of open-air sculptures, in the activities of the numerous private galleries (concentrated in and around carrer Consell de Cent, in the Born area and most recently in certain streets in Ciutat Vella), in the exhibitions organized by cultural centres and institutions -such as the MACBA, the CCCB, the Palau de la Virreina, or the Art Centre Santa Mònica- and single-artist museums that also exhibit the work of their subject's contemporaries as a means of extending our awareness of their historical and artistic context, such as the Museu Picasso, Fundació Joan Miró, Fundació Antoni Tàpies.
 
As far as the actual watching of films is concerned, in parallel with the proliferation of multi-screen complexes in shopping centres, Barcelona has ben a pioneer in innovative experiences such as La nit del cinema, screening films in digital format as part of the Grec Summer Festival, and Europa, Europa, in which five European cities have set up real-time connections through their cinemas as a way of addressing the issue of racism.

Architecture:

One of the most notable features of Barcelona is the city's great architectural richness, a characteristic that is the result of the succession of the peoples who have inhabited the city during many hundreds of years, and is manifested in an urban structure that has been configured in four major phases:
 
The early nucleus. The first important architectural landmarks date back to the original nucleus inside the city's Roman walls, the centre of which is the Plaça de Sant Jaume. This first phase witnessed one of the crucial processes in the life of the city: its Romanization.

Mediaeval and modern Barcelona. The Mediaeval period gave Barcelona one of its outstanding architectural gems, the Gothic quarter, which presents all the splendour of an era epitomized by the Plaça del Rei, with its churches, houses, palaces and chapels and the façade of the Cathedral. Of note outside of the Gothic quarter are carrer Montcada and its noble palaces, the historic Hospital de la Santa Creu, the Drassanes shipyards and the monasteries of Sant Pau del Camp and Santa Maria de Pedralbes. Fine examples of the architecture of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries can be found in Barcelona in the churches of Betlem, the Mare de Déu de la Mercè, the Casa de la Caritat, the Palau de la Virreina, the Labyrinth in Horta and the various manor houses still to be seen in Barcelona.
 

Modernism:

Modernism is a cultural movement which had its heyday in the West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, embodying the most renovative tendencies in literature, theatre, architecture, fine arts, decoration and the design of furniture and other objects.

Modernism is one of the principal attractions of Barcelona, to the extent that many of the city’s modernist buildings are acknowledged by UNESCO as World Heritage sites.

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