Font de Canaletes: Drink and You Will Return

Why is it significant?

Find the slender black iron fountain at the very top of La Rambla, the one crowned with lamps, its taps polished by thousands of hands. Watch the people bending over it for a moment. Hardly any of them are thirsty. They are making a promise to the city.

Key Facts

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Find the slender black iron fountain at the very top of La Rambla, the one crowned with lamps, its taps polished by thousands of hands. Watch the people bending over it for a moment. Hardly any of them are thirsty. They are making a promise to the city. The legend of the Font de Canaletes is simple: drink from it, and you will fall in love with Barcelona and always come back. Locals say it with a wink, and then quietly take a sip themselves before leaving on a long journey. The name is usually explained by the little water channels, the canaletes, that once carried water to this corner of the city, long before this nineteenth-century cast-iron fountain was set up. Now imagine this spot on the night FC Barcelona wins a title. Tens of thousands of people pour in from every street, waving scarves, climbing lamp posts, singing until dawn, with the fountain in the middle like a lighthouse. The tradition is usually traced back to the 1930s, when a sports newspaper on this stretch pinned up the latest football results on a board, and fans gathered here to read them and argue. They never really stopped coming. Look down the long avenue of plane trees in front of you. La Rambla was not built as a street at all. It was a seasonal stream bed running outside the medieval walls, dry most of the year and a torrent after storms, and its name comes from the Arabic word ramla, sand. Only when the walls along it came down, in the eighteenth century, did the sandy gully turn into Barcelona's great promenade. That is why locals often speak of Les Rambles, in the plural. From here to the sea, about a kilometre and a quarter, the avenue changes its name five times, and each section has its own history and its own crowd. You are standing on the Rambla de Canaletes. Now walk downhill, towards the sea, and stop at the first great stone church facade on your right.