Secret Barcelona

Sergio Vila-Sanjuán and Maria Carme Roca

Moderator: Elena Hevia

Barcelona has offered countless authors its neighbourhoods, streets, monuments and corners as the setting for their novels. This is the case of journalist and writer Sergio Vila-Sanjuán and historian, Catalan philologist and writer Maria Carme Roca. In his latest book, the suspense novel El misterio del Barrio Gótico, Vila-Sanjuán delves into Barcelona's old quarter to show the darker (and lesser-known) side of the city in the 1980s. Roca sets her historical fiction in the neighbouring quarter of Sant Pere, at the turn of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In El Pasaje, Roca portrays the coexistence of two Barcelonas—the new and the old—linked by this small, almost secret passageway.

Both novels have won awards and serve as a perfect example of what the city has to offer in terms of fiction and literature.