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The Raval suburb is included in the
Ciutat Vella district, Barcelona´s old part of town, together with the Gothic and the district El Born/La Ribera.
It is delimited to the west by La Rambla and in the east by Paral.lel. The sea and the Ronda de Sant Pau define the south and north, respectively.
Its tiny dark streets make the suburb a venue for a mob film, with an atmosphere of coastal and Castilian folk.
In 1800 it was habituated slightly and it was the area of vegetable gardens that supplied a great part to the city. Then in mid XIX Century, it was transformed and the suburb was turned rapidly in to a textile zone, which received a great flux of province folk and which then became a brick and leather industry.
The excessive urbanisation made marginalization grow in a suburb where bathrooms were shared with interior yards for a whole building. The pollution and the epidemic problems changed frequently and the mortality rates skyrocketed.
The term "barrio chino" (“China Town”), the reason the district got so popular, does not have anything to do with immigration of Chinese, but it was Francesc Madrid who adopted this name since watching the film "Chinatown", filmed in San Francisco (EEUU), in 1920, and its similarities of a problematic and social conflict suburb.
The transit of sailors, prostitution, robberies and local problems made the suburb well-known to a worse form.
The arrival of heroin at the end of the ´70´s brought new problems and robberies, and consequent isolation, especially in touristic terms.
The recuperations of the suburb thanks to the Olympics of ´92, assumed, from ´88 the construction of new dwellings and the demolition of prostitution spotlights and the trafficking of heroin.
The relatively low price of housing and venues permitted the situation of various artists, artisans and art gallery types, between those many of them foreigners that posted themselves in this area of the city, as well as the subsequent proliferation of entertainment venues, such as restaurants, bars and shops that became in fashion at the beginning of the ´90´s, adding to the already existing theatrical offering in the area.
Also, marking The Olympic Games, and the restructure of the city, the most important culture centres of the Ayuntamiento (Autonomous Government) where situated in El Raval, the
MACBA and the
CCCB.
In ´99 some blocks were knocked down to open the
Rambla del Raval, a new intent to "lavado de cara" (literally meaning a face wash) make a good clean up of the this distrcit.
With a great density of population, El Raval shares local itself with Catalans and Spaniards, a new migration coming from mostly Pakistan, Philippines and Maghreb, which is taken by the authorities as a slither to the of coexistence and multicultural. This process was created in a film from
José Luis Guerín "En Construcción" ('01).