There is a lot of gastronomic life beyond Barcelona. In the metropolitan area, less than an hour from the Catalan capital, you can find a great diversity of establishments –beach and mountain– with prices suitable for all audiences. At ARA, we give you a selection of 13 of the best options available, whether you want to escape Barcelona without going too far or if you prefer to discover the surrounding municipalities through their bars and restaurants.

We arranged to meet at a quarter past nine in the morning in Castelldefels, but I arrive late after an hour of traffic jams on the AP-7 and the ronda de Dalt. The photographer, Pau de la Calle, calls me, a little startled: Juan Antonio Flecha (Junín, Argentina, 1977) has already passed, as his surname indicates, like an arrow, with his two daughters sitting on the back of the bicycle. I catch him just as he has dropped them off at school, in Gavà Mar. From there we will cycle to his house, where a podcast recording awaits him.

Paul McGrath Benito (Gavà, 2002) became the first Catalan to win a medal at the World Athletics Championships in 14 years thanks to his bronze in the final of the 20 km walk to Tokyo. The son of two teachers, his mother from Gavà and his father from Glasgow, he studies journalism, dreams of the Los Angeles Games, and passionately defends a sport, walking, that is not always understood.

If it had lasted another two hours in 2024, Catalonia would have ended the year with a bad crime rate. It is a simple coincidence that only 120 more crimes were recorded in 2023 than in 2024. This is because almost 1,400 criminal acts are committed in the country every day, half a million crimes at the end of the year. This gives an average of 60 crimes every hour, with these two hours being the ones that separated Catalonia from ending the year in positive or negative.

Crime is a cause for concern. In fact, it is the first concern of the people of Barcelona and the third of the people of Catalonia. This does not mean that this is an unsafe country or that the situation is getting worse: last year ended with almost the same number of crimes as the previous year. It is not getting worse, but it is not getting better either. And scenes such as the hundreds of shots fired with war weapons in La Mina and some recent executions remind us that drug mafias continue to spread their tentacles that are lacking in different areas of our society. Tentacles that when we least expect it can trigger violence. Organised crime linked to drug trafficking is one of the most obvious problems facing police forces, which at the same time must also combat robberies, fraud – especially through new technologies – and theft. The police have work to do and are aware of it.