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Entertainment Overview

Barcelona nights are long and as wild as you want, filling all of the hours of darkness and often rolling until dawn. Most of the best clubs don't even open until well after midnight, but cafés and music bars serve as recruiting venues for the night's mission. The classical progression begins with drinks (wine or beer), tapas and dinner, a jazz or flamenco concert around 11 PM, then a pub or a music bar or two, and then, if the body can keep up with the spirit, dancing. Strutting your stuff on the dance floor can be done in a variety of locales, from clubs to ballroom dance halls, and is apt to continue until the sun comes up. Late-night bars and early-morning cafés provide an all-important break to refresh and refuel before doing another round of moves.

There aren't just bars in Barcelona, but a suite of subcatergories for drinks: coctelerías (cocktail bars), whiskerias (often singles bars with professional escorts), xampanyerias (champagne -- actually cava, Catalan sparkling wine -- bars), cerveserias (beer halls), and wine-tasting cellars. A bar musical is defined in Spain as any bar with music loud enough to drown out conversation.

New wine bars, cafés, music bars, and tiny live-music clubs are constantly scraping plaster from 500-year-old brick walls to expose medieval structural elements that offer striking backdrops for postmodern people and conversations. The most common closing time for 90% of Barcelona's nocturnal bars is 3 AM, though this may vary according to clientele flow.

The area around the Passeig del Born, in medieval times the jousting grounds for knights in shining armor, is alive with bars, cafés, and small clubs. The Raval, not too long ago a lowlife scene, is now merely dive-bar-chic, with hip saloons along Nou de la Rambla and Carrer del Carme. Along Carrer Marià Cubí and between Carrers Aribau and Calvet above the Travessera de Gràcia is a series of lively bars and terraces. Port Olímpic and Port Vell's Maremagnum area, generally avoidable, seem to attract the nocturnal dregs, though CDLC (Carpe Diem Lounge Club) rises above the fray.

Barcelona's gay culture is alive and booming, with part of the Eixample (the area bordered by the streets of Diputació and Aragó, Balmes and Villarroel) rechristened as the Gaixample. Hetero-friendly gay restaurants include Le Lacydon, Domèstic, Azul Azul, and Colby. There are also saunas, bookstores, sex shops (Blue Box, D-arness, and Nostromo), at least one hotel (Hotel Axel), and a movie theater all aligned with the city's gay population.