I grew up in the neighborhood of Grácia, in Barcelona. A neighborhood embellished with small shops and stores that offer almost everything. Some with charming salesman and others not so much, but that did not matter, they were there and all of them were shaping the character that was having my neighborhood.
Now when I come back, I miss them and I realize how they were important to the identity of the neighborhood.
Nowadays, we are witnessing radical changes in trading. Large multinational chains and the strong footprint of the globalizing and internet, are not only threatening the business of small shopkeepers, but they often threaten the personality that differentiates one city from another.
That’s why I like to highlight in Google Maps the small shops that, with great effort and in adverse circumstances, take the risk to invest talent and own resources to preserve the history of their little universe, which is their neighborhood. Citizens should thank many of them for the effort to make of their shop windows, beautiful works of art, that color the city’s walks.I’d like to explain thousands of anecdotes on how rewarding is for me to help small shops to be better represented in Google Maps.
As an example, I like to explain how surprising was my experience of visiting the restaurant “Debut”, a small and unknown restaurant for me where I went by chance. Its staff, very
young and eager to fight, were all enthusiastic when I told them that I would write a review in Google Maps, so I felt that this business was small and little known. Well, today one of the photos I made there, is the most watched of the 3000 photos I uploaded, it has been seen 900,000 times in 5 months!Or the Verdi bakery. Thanks to my review, I had the opportunity to chat with the baker about the surprising decoration of the blinds of his shop.
He told me that he had spent a lot of time finding a local urban art artist who could decorate the blinds of his shop. The result are four gorgeous graffitis that all pedestrians can enjoy every evening.I end up with the photos of a couple of shops that have strive
d to recover the history and that are a visual gift, the Reñé restaurant that occupies an old pastry shop and the child clothing vintage store Maria Rosa.