You'll find British daily
newspapers,
USA Today
and the
International
Herald Tribune on sale
in Barcelona. Out of the
city your choice is more
limited, though you'll
have no trouble finding
something readable in the
tourist resorts and
provincial capitals.
Barcelona
Metropolitan is a
magazine for English
speakers living in
Barcelona, but useful for
visitors too. You can pick
up a (free) copy from
hotels, bars, cinemas
showing English-language
films and some Turismes.
Other listings magazines
available at kiosks are
the weekly
Guia del
Ocio and the monthly
Top
Tips , both in
Spanish/Catalan but easily
deciphered.
Of the Spanish
papers the two best
are the Barcelona edition
of the liberal El País
(Castilian) - the only one
with much serious analysis
or foreign news coverage,
plus a daily listings
section - and its rival, El
Mundo , the
Madrid-based sister paper
of Britain's Guardian.
La Vanguardia
(Barcelona paper;
Castilian) is conservative
and a big local seller; El
Periodico (Barcelona
paper; Castilian) is a
popular paper with big
headlines and lots of
photos, but also extensive
coverage of proper news; Avui
is the chief nationalist
paper, printed in Catalan;
El Diari de Barcelona
is a liberal Catalan
paper. In addition,
there's a wide range of
newspapers entirely
devoted to sport. If you
are looking for an
apartment, job or anything
secondhand, you should
pick up the classifieds
newspaper Primeramà
, which comes out on
Mondays and Thursdays.
In Catalunya you can pick
up two national
TV
channels , TV1 and La
2, a couple of Catalan
channels, TV3 and Canal
33, and the private Antena
3 and Tele 5 channels. In
Barcelona you can also get
Barcelona TV which is
useful for information
about local events. You'll
inadvertently catch more
TV than you expect sitting
in bars and restaurants,
and on the whole it's a
fairly entertaining
mixture of grim game
shows, and tacky song and
dance variety shows. Soaps
are a particular
speciality, both
home-grown Catalan and
Spanish
culebrones
and South American
telenovelas
, whereas locally-produced
sitcoms and series compete
with dubbed versions of
North American favourites
like
Ally McBeal
and
E.R . Film
programming is especially
good, and many foreign
films (and shows) are
broadcast in
dual
(simultaneously in the
original and dubbed).
Sports fans are well
catered for, with regular
live coverage of
basketball and football
matches - in the football
season, you can watch one
or two live matches a week
in most bars.
If you have a radio
which picks up short-wave
you can tune into the BBC
World Service,
broadcasting in English
for most of the day on
frequencies between 12MHz
(24m) and 4MHz (75m).
