Barcelona guided walking tours - FC Barça special

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Basic data

grade	easy
base	Barcelona
location tags	Barcelona, Barcelonès, Camp Nou, Catalonia, Catalunya, Cataluña, Hostafrancs, Las Corts, Les Corts, Nou Camp, Plaza de España, Plaça d'Espanya, Sans, Sants,
theme tags	Jewish, gay, sport,
walking distance	6.25 km / 3.88 miles
walking time, excluding breaks	3.25 hr
total return travel time from base to walk	0 hr
total time from "hello" to "goodbye"	4.39 hr
fiestas and markets on the way	first weekend in September (fiesta mayor in a couple of streets) Note that there are also events in most places on January 6 (Three Kings), Carnival, Easter, April 23 (St George), June 23 (St John), and September 11 (Catalan regional/national day)
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Description of the walk

The stand in the first ground owned by FC Barcelona was a fairly simply affair, and it gave Barça fans the nickname they've had ever since, culés: row on row of arses was all that could be seen from the street. (Cule = arse also exists in older English. For example the Oxford English Dictionary has Hutchinson Witchcraft (1718): She told her Neighbours it would make the Cule of the Maid divide into Two Parts.)

In 1920, with membership rising rapidly and trophies pouring in, the Swiss German founder and five times president of the club, Hans Gamper, decided to build a new, arse-proof stadium on fields on the edge of an old village called Les Corts. It was inaugurated two years later with a friendly against St Mirren (2-1), and was used until 1957, when the massive Camp Nou, which doubled maximum capacity (120,000 in 1982), opened half a mile further out of town.

This walk introduces you to the districts housing the Les Corts and Camp Nou stadia and helps you understand the transition of this part of Barcelona’s periphery from farming to textiles to the mass entertainment; how a club that has been used as a surrogate for nation by political Catalanism could have made its home in a district full of immigrants from southern Spain, one of the focuses of an ethnic mini-civil war between Catalanist fascist and Murcian anarchist gunmen that flared sporadically in the 1930s.

The route takes you from the headquarters of the Francoist military police and the most glorious of Barcelona’s three bullrings via

• some Miró,
• a fascinating market in a gypsy neighbourhood,
• the remains of several large textile mills,
• the site of the Les Corts ground,
• a charming ex-village square with bars,
• a rather nifty maternity hospital,
• and the graves of one of the few footballers to play for three countries (four, if you count stateless nations) and of dozens of Jewish refugees from the Eastern Mediterranean

to Camp Nou.

Optional visit to the trannies as seen in the work of Mr Almodóvar (evening walks only). Walk can be shortened if you’re with kids.

We also take people to minor league and non-league matches and to fan bars etc. Teams include the local giant-killers and several of the more controversial and/or ridiculous neighbourhood teams. Our WSGâ„¢ applies, but there’s virtually no violence anyway. We don’t book tickets for Espanyol or Barça and recommend you try the usual online options or find a bar outside the tourist districts and watch it on telly.

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