Gracia Neighborhood: The Town Inside The City

As the title suggests the Gràcia quarter in spite of being a consolidated part of Barcelona city still makes you feel as if you were visiting the neighboring town it used to be back in early XIX when Eixample was just a plan in Ildefonso Cerdà's mind and there was nothing between them and the city behind walls (notice in this Wikipedia image the original urbanistic plan depicting the old city below, the symmetric blocks of future Eixample and the Gracia ville up north). Not that this is an external municipality anymore and its ways are not by any chance provincial in the pejorative sense of the word but the fact that most of its streets are pedestrian friendly, the fact that there is an intense small business activity, the fact life is so "extroverted" here, with neighbors spending more time on the sidewalks, on the squares, on the bar terraces than at home, really creates a comfortable, homy atmosphere that permeates your every pore upon trespassing its boundaries no matter which direction you are coming from. I hope this everyday scene adds up to what I wanted to convey in today's post.