Next on the list is the Festa de Sant Roc, which is the Gothic Quarter’s annual festival. As well as featuring the usual correfocs, parades, and castells, there are some unique highlights including the cucanya contest, which is a children’s game involving walking across a revolving greasy pole to win a prize. For adults, there is a drinking competition where you must swig large quantities of wine from a porró carafe.
Sants – a local area with few foreigners and even fewer tourists – is a smaller version of Gracia, with a focus on live music. Residents do decorate some of the streets but it’s much less crowded. With the Espanya Industrial Park nearby, there is plenty for children to do with concerts for the kiddies, bouncy cancels, and fun running and bike races.
You’ll also get a sense of the real traditions of the area, with sardine cookouts, games of dominoes, craft fairs, board game tournaments, botiffara (a Catalan sausage) lunches, and plenty of Vermouth.
Most neighborhoods do have some form of festa major, but the rest tend to be small in comparison. Raval (diversity- and music-focused), Poble Nou (art- and community-themed), and Barceloneta (beach- and sea-themed), all bring together live music, food, gigantes, correfocs and castells. Sant Antoni‘s festa major stands out, being held in January to celebrate the feast day of their saint. Here the unusual (and definitely unique) highlight involves a parade called Tred Tombs where priests bless residents’ pets.
While it’s not technically a neighborhood festival, special mention goes to the festa of La Merce, which is the Saint of Barcelona. For a week in September, the city is alive with concerts, theater, wine tastings, parades, food stalls and more, before culminating in a giant fireworks display at Plaça de Espanya.

A Guide To Barcelona's Neighborhood Festivals

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