Barcelona's Gothic Quarter boasts one of the highest concentrations of restaurants per square meter in the entire city. Nestled between La Rambla, Via Laietana, Plaça Catalunya, and the port, the narrow streets conceal a wide variety of fare: tourist traps, fast-food chains masquerading as local cuisine, and, amidst it all, restaurants that take their food seriously. The challenge lies in finding them without getting lost, as generic offerings have taken over a neighborhood that has lost too many of its landmarks.

The process is simple: choose the box you want, pay for it, and take it home without knowing what's inside. The Surprise Box store on Carrer Ferran in Barcelona doesn't go unnoticed. It's a warehouse (or a pit) of lost packages from e-commerce giants like Amazon, Shein, AliExpress, or Temu: products that haven't reached their recipients. Pedestrians constantly come and go, intrigued by the items hidden on the shelves, packed in boxes of different sizes and origins. Many rummage and shake, trying to figure out the contents of a package, but few risk paying for a random surprise. The price is around 24 euros per kilo, calculated on the scales scattered throughout the store. Intrigue is the key to the business, and ARA has tried the experience.

There are as many as 25 premises with their shutters down, seven of them sporting to-let signs, in a stretch of just over 300 metres between the Rambla and Plaça Sant Jaume in Barcelona. Some are boarded up and full of graffiti after staying closed for months. Carrer Ferran is a prime example of the devastation the pandemic has wrought on the Barcelona's Barri Gòtic. The situation, despite not representing the neighbourhood as a whole – where around 75% of shops have reopened, according data collected by Barnacentre – is better than the one described by this newspaper last spring, when almost twice as many shops were closed. But neighbours and shopkeepers in the area complain that the pandemic has finished off long-standing bars and shops, and brought in even more shops selling souvenirs (three on Carrer Ferran alone) or mobile phone cases (one taking the spot where last year a hardware store had opened).

While the mystery of who stole a wrought iron dragon from Baixada de Santa Eulàlia still lingers around Barcelona's Barri Gòtic, the neighbours discovered a new attack to the area's heritage yesterday: the fountain of Sant Felip Neri square was vandalised on Saturday night. For reasons that no one can explain, the capitel of the central column – which initially held a sculpture stolen years ago – fell into the water and broke. "They don't respect anything," neighbourhood platform Fem Gòtic lamented on Twitter, where it asked the City Council to react quickly so that no one could steal the broken part and further hinder the reconstruction of the fountain.