From a collectivised brewery to the vermut bar.
One route across Sant Antoni and the old Paral·lel, in the order the city lived it — ending where every good Barcelona afternoon ends. It's a walking tour told from the street: we take each site in from outside, stepping inside only at the Mercat de Sant Antoni when it's open.
Fàbrica Moritz
This 1864 brewery — once the largest in Spain — rose on land cleared when the medieval walls came down. In July 1936 its workers collectivised it and ran it by committee right through the war. Descend to the cellars today and you cross three ages of the city's defences at once: Roman wall, medieval bastion, and a concrete air-raid shelter.
Fàbrica Moritz
Ronda de Sant Antoni
On the night of 19 July 1936 this ring road was a front line. Workers and loyal Assault Guards threw up barricades of sandbags and overturned cars, snipers fired from the rooftops, and home-made armoured trucks — Hispano-Suizas plated with steel overnight — rolled toward the rebels' defeat and General Goded's surrender.
Ronda de Sant Antoni
Mercat de Sant Antoni
Antoni Rovira i Trias's great cast-iron market, opened in 1882, became the stage for the slow violence of hunger: ration cards, queues before dawn, a black market, and supply lines from Aragon and Valencia cut one by one. Its Sunday book stalls would later turn quietly subversive — a place to find Catalan and banned titles under Franco. It's the one stop on the walk where we actually step inside — market opening hours permitting.
Mercat de Sant Antoni
Ronda de Sant Pau
Here stood the Escola Pia de Sant Antoni, a vast church-and-school block set alight on 19 July 1936. For the anarchist movement the Church was the ideological arm of an oligarchic state, and with rumours of snipers in bell towers, the militias saw the burning of religious buildings as a kind of "social hygiene." The flames took a Renaissance altarpiece and an archive kept since 1683.
Ronda de Sant Pau
Avinguda del Paral·lel
They called the Paral·lel a modern Babel — more theatres and cabarets per square metre than anywhere in Europe, where Eixample gentlemen rubbed shoulders with the Raval's workers. At number 69, the Bar La Tranquilidad was the anarchist nerve centre: Durruti and Ascaso planned here, and from these marble tables the patrols were armed on the night of 18 July 1936.
Avinguda del Paral·lel
Teatre Apolo
Opened in 1904, the Apolo was the Paral·lel's temple of zarzuela and music-hall — until the summer of 1936, when the entertainment union collectivised every theatre, cinema and dance hall in the city. Star salaries were abolished, the box office helped arm the Durruti column at the front, and the stage kept the rear-guard going.
Teatre Apolo
Refugi 307
Barcelona was the first city bombed systematically from the air, by Mussolini's aviators flying out of Mallorca — so its people dug. Poble-sec neighbours cut nearly 400 metres of zigzag galleries into Montjuïc by hand, vaulted in concrete to take the blast, with an infirmary, a fountain and a room for the children — shelter for some 2,000. Notices still on the walls forbade talk of politics or religion, and punished anyone who "spread pessimism." We take it in from the street — the restored galleries inside are a city museum (MUHBA) with their own separate ticket.
Refugi 307
Vermut & tapas in Sant Antoni
After 1939 the unions were outlawed and the streets fell silent — and the humble Sunday vermut, siphon and tinned olives, became a small ritual of survival in the neighbourhood's old bodegas. We end where that custom still lives: a glass straight from the barrel, a spread of tapas, and time to take it all in. Included in your ticket.
Vermut & tapas
