Barcelona’s Zara Shame
I have great admiration for Barcelona City Council - they do great work, and really seem to care about the city and its people.
But they’ve made a huge bollix
out of something this morning.
Cines Paris, in the cities main shopping thoroughfare of Porta de l’Angel has been ripped down.
For what purpose? ANOTHER ZARA - as if the city, the country, and Europe didn’t have enough of this sprawling chain.
Zara’s parent Inditex already owns most of the street with Often, Massimo Dutti (twice), Zara (twice already), Pull and Bear, Bershka and Oysho. Now they want a third Zara within 100 metres of each other. (They have 1,627 shops of various flavours in Spain today.)
And to make this third Zara, what did they do? They pulled down an attractive old cinema. See photos for a before and after.
I can live with there being another Zara, but I can’t condone their pulling down of the facade, could they have not been inventive, keep the facade, and build their shop into the existing structure. It may even have been an opportunity to do something very cool, keeping the existing screen intact, for example, and play old movies onto it in the middle of the retail space - what a lost opportunity!
In my after-shot taken within the last hour, note the number of people standing 
around looking at the construction site. This isn’t normal. People weren’t happy this morning, particularly the elderly, I spoke to one woman in her sixties who lamented that this is where she went when she was a young woman on her first night’s out in the city. Where are Barcelona’s plethora of hippies, objectors and okupa/squatters when you need them? Certainly not here, certainly not in the midst of this bloody mess, where they might have gained some popular support for their movements.
Shame. And shame on Zara.