Poble Sec Barcelona: Tapas, Montjuïc and the New Gastronomy

Poble Sec occupies the slopes below Montjuïc between the Paral·lel avenue and the hillside, a neighbourhood that has undergone one of Barcelona's most striking culinary transformations in the past decade. Once a working-class district of workers from the nearby port and textile factories, Poble Sec has developed a dining scene on Carrer de Blai — known simply as "the Blai" — that has become the most concentrated collection of pintxos bars outside of the Basque Country. The street's bars lay out their counter displays of bread-topped morsels at lunchtime and evening, and the ritual of moving from bar to bar sampling as you go has become one of the defining eating experiences in contemporary Barcelona.

Beyond the Blai's pintxos scene, Poble Sec contains some of the most ambitious restaurants in the city, attracting chefs who find the neighbourhood's rents more manageable than the Eixample or Born without sacrificing the quality of their audience. Bodega Sepúlveda, Quimet & Quimet (a legendary standing-room vermouth bar operating since 1914 in a room barely large enough for ten customers), and the newer generation of natural wine bars and contemporary Catalan restaurants have together created an eating and drinking culture of real depth. The neighbourhood's position beneath Montjuïc means that a meal here can be combined with a visit to the Fundació Joan Miró, the MNAC museum or the Olympic stadium within the same afternoon.

Montjuïc itself is Poble Sec's most remarkable amenity — a 184-metre hill of gardens, fortifications, museums and open-air pools that offers the finest views of Barcelona and the Mediterranean available from within the city limits. The Fundació Joan Miró, housed in Josep Lluís Sert's 1975 building of white walls and skylights, contains the most comprehensive collection of the Catalan surrealist's work in the world, and its terrace garden of Miró sculptures against the Barcelona skyline is among the most pleasurable art experiences in Europe. The Teatre Grec, an open-air amphitheatre carved into the Montjuïc hillside, hosts the annual Grec Festival of performing arts each summer.