Five rooms in the old city, each one older than its own paperwork admits or younger than its doorway claims. Vermut standing up, absinthe sitting down, and a great deal of arguing about dates in between.
Can Culleretes, stop three, is closed from 27 July to 24 August 2026 inclusive, which its own site states plainly. If you are here in that window take the road as four stops and eat somewhere else. Two of the others keep their own awkward days: Els Quatre Gats is shut on Mondays and Bar La Plata on Sundays.
- 1 · The Cold Open
Els Quatre Gats
Pere Romeu opened this on 12 June 1897 with Rusiñol, Casas and Utrillo behind him, in Puig i Cadafalch's Casa Martí. Picasso had his first solo show here in 1899, aged seventeen, and drew the menu. Then it failed in 1903, and the room spent seventy five years as an artists' circle, then a warehouse, then nothing, before reopening in 1978. The house tells that as one unbroken line and it is not: the business you walk into is forty eight years old. Vermut at the tiled bar. It holds the city's top emblematic listing, one of about thirty, and the building above it is protected at national grade.
founded 1897, dark from 1903, reopened 1978 · Tue-Sat 11am till midnight, Sun till 5pm, closed Mon · verified Aug 2026
- 2 · The Detour
Bar La Plata
Four tapas, the same four since 1945: fried fish, a botifarra montadito, an anchovy montadito, and a plate of tomato, onion and olives. That is the entire menu and nobody has ever asked for more. Josep Marjanet and Joaquima Planas opened it and their great grandson is behind it now. Pepe Gómez has been serving here since 1972, and in July 2026 the city's restaurant awards made him waiter of the year for fifty three years of it. Vermut, wine, beer, standing room only.
the house says 1945, and the menu has not moved since · 11am till 3pm and 6pm till 11pm, closed Sun · verified Aug 2026
- 3 · The Anchor
Can Culleretes
The doorway says 1786 and that number comes from a former owner's memoirs. The first hard paper is 1857, in a Barcelona directory, and it lists this address as a chocolate shop rather than a restaurant; it was both by 1906. The Agut family took it on in 1958 and the sisters Montserrat and Alícia run it now with the third generation around them. The name is what the waiters used to shout for more little spoons. It is a restaurant rather than a drinking room, so arrive hungry, and order the chocolate it was founded on.
documented from 1857, claims 1786 · lunch Tue-Sun, dinner Thu-Sat, closed 27 Jul to 24 Aug 2026 · verified Aug 2026
- 4 · The Wildcard
Boadas
Miquel Boadas was born in Havana in 1895 and learned the trade there, throwing the drink between two tins the way they did at El Floridita, and he opened this narrow room off the Rambla in 1933. No kitchen, barely any seats, barmen in turquoise dinner jackets, and a dry martini that is the whole reason to come. It stayed open through the war in 1936 and the street fighting of May 1937. The family is out now: Simone Caporale and Marc Álvarez took it on a couple of years ago. Ring first, because nobody publishes hours you can trust.
est. 1933, no longer a Boadas family bar · evenings, but sources disagree, phone ahead · verified Aug 2026
- 5 · The Last Call
Bar Marsella
Absinthe, poured over a slotted spoon and a sugar cube with iced water dripped through it, at marble tables under lamps nobody has cleaned on purpose. The 1820 everybody prints is oral tradition: the first documentary trace of a business here is an 1899 yearbook, and the city's own catalogue dates it to 1898. The celebrity roster is worse, since Van Gogh never came to Barcelona at all. Here is the true and better fact: the city bought this building in December 2013 after a campaign to save it, and the Lamiel family still run the bar inside it.
documented from 1899, claims 1820 · evenings till late, morning session doubtful · verified Aug 2026