Barcelona guided walking tours - How the US 6th fleet saved Barcelona's fleshpots

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Basic data

grade	easy
base	Barcelona
location tags	Barcelona, Barrio Chino, Catalonia, Catalunya, Cataluña, Gothic quarter, Raval, port of Barcelona,
theme tags	Gaudí­, gay, military, social history,
walking distance	3 km / 1.86 miles
walking time, excluding breaks	1.50 hr
total return travel time from base to walk	0 hr
total time from "hello" to "goodbye"	2.03 hr
comments, pingbacks, trackbacks	Show/hide Comments are closed.

Description of the walk

The appalling problems faced by Spain after the Civil War were compounded by the adoption of Albanian-style DIY isolationism. The results: hunger in the countryside and a withering of business in the towns. Barcelona’s port was traditionally a thriving den of prostitutes, artistes, thieves second only to Marseille, but in the 1940s it was a bleak place, pocked by the craters caused by Italian bombers from Mallorca. In the 1950s things changed, as technocrats belonging to the Opus Dei sect took over the government and made up with the Vatican and the US, opening Spain to foreign investment and foreign markets to Spanish goods. There were two obvious immediate benefits for Barcelona: the 1952 international Eucaristic Congress, and the arrival of the US 6th fleet on friendship visits. Numerous photos exist of lanky blond boys in sailor suits disappearing into the port slums, arm-in-arm with small brunettes, and there are countless tales of the marvellous livings made by the latter, the pickpockets and the bar proprietors. This walk takes you from the statue to the man who discovered the New World through the district that constituted for many of them the most interesting discovery made by American sailors in the Old World. In this, the bottom end of the so-called Barrio Chino, you’ll see remaining traces of the bawdy houses, pornographers penicillin doctors–one brothel is now a police station–and bars of Barcelona’s Roaring 50s, as well as voodoo doctors, the left’s main local Civil War torture cells, traces of literary pervert Jean Genet, a key Almodóvar location, and the site of a tragic attack by Catalan terrorists on US sailors in 1987.

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