Plaça de Fernando de los Rios

Forget the Gothic Quarter. Forget the polished marble of Passeig de Gràcia and the choreographed chaos of La Rambla. If you want to see where the blood of Barcelona actually pumps, you have to head northeast, out to Sant Martí, to places like Plaça de Fernando de los Rios. This isn’t the Barcelona they put on the posters. There are no t-shirt shops here, no overpriced sangria, and nobody is going to offer you a selfie stick. It’s a slab of civic reality tucked away in the La Verneda i la Pau neighborhood, and it’s beautiful precisely because it doesn’t try to be.

When you walk into this square off Carrer de l'Empordà, the first thing that hits you isn't an architectural marvel, but the scale of the residential blocks surrounding it. These are the 'beehives' of the 1960s and 70s—functional, dense, and unapologetic. The square serves as the neighborhood’s collective living room. It’s a patch of green and grey where the air smells of laundry detergent from the balconies above and the faint, metallic scent of the nearby industrial zones. It’s a place where the trees—pines and tipuanas—have had to fight for their space, providing a canopy for people who actually live here.

The square is named after Fernando de los Ríos Urruti, a man who believed in education and social justice during the Second Republic. There’s a certain poetic weight to that. In a city that often feels like it’s being sold off piece by piece to the highest bidder, a public space like this feels like a holdout. It’s utilitarian. You’ve got the standard-issue Barcelona benches—the ones designed to be sturdy enough to outlast a revolution—and a playground where the local kids burn off energy while their grandparents argue about football or the price of bread. It’s the sound of the city without the filter: the screech of a scooter, the rhythmic thud of a ball against a wall, and the rapid-fire Catalan and Spanish of people who have known each other for forty years.

Is it 'worth visiting' in the traditional sense? If you’re looking for Gaudí, no. Stay on the blue bus. But if you’re the kind of traveler who finds more soul in a local bakery than a museum, then yes. This is one of the best things to do in Sant Martí if you want to understand the social fabric of the city. It’s a reminder that Barcelona is a city of workers, of migrants, and of families who fought for every square meter of green space they have. There’s a quiet dignity in the way the light hits the concrete at sunset, turning the utilitarian into something almost cinematic.

You come here to sit. You come here to watch the dogs sniff the tree trunks and the teenagers try to look cool while ignoring their parents. You come here to realize that the 'real' Barcelona isn't a museum—it's a living, breathing, sometimes messy, and always resilient organism. It’s a place where the history isn't written in stone carvings, but in the collective memory of the people sitting on the next bench over. It’s honest, it’s raw, and it’s exactly what a city square should be: a place for everyone, and a place for no one in particular.