On the Road is a travel bookshop in El Raval — the neighbourhood west of the Ramblas that the guidebooks called dangerous for long enough that it now has the kind of independent commercial life that develops in places the property market overlooked. The shop is small and correctly proportioned: travel writing, cartography, language guides, literature in translation organised by country, and the shelf of used titles that makes a travel bookshop worth returning to. The selection reflects someone who has actually been to most of the places represented — the difference between a curated travel section and a general-interest one is always apparent in the presence of books that are not obvious. The Raval location places it ten minutes from the MACBA and the Filmoteca de Catalunya; the afternoon walk from one to the other, through the Raval's particular mixture of residential and cultural, is the correct context for the shop.
El Raval, Barcelona, Spain