Bodega Bartolí opened in 1939 as a little bulk wine shop in Barcelona’s Sants neighborhood. Then everything changed for the bodega some 20 years later when a local client arrived with a stomachache. He asked a young Marina Dolz, who was minding the wine shop with her husband, if she could prepare some soup for him. It was the first dish she cooked there and, since then, Bodega Bartolí has moved far beyond simply being a wine store. At the time Bodega Bartolí opened, Sants was still an industrial quarter with several factories and thousands of workers. During the 1940s, the bodega sold both bulk wine to the neighbors and factory employees and barreja (a very traditional drink made of Muscat wine and anise liquor) to the wheelwrights passed by everyday.

It’s not too often that you find a restaurant in Barcelona where rock & roll, blues and jazz are some of the main ingredients. But that’s just the case at Bar Ramón, an iconic restaurant and tapas bar in Sant Antoni. Mediterranean grilled red prawns, patatas bravas, and xipirones (baby squids) a la Andaluza (coated in batter and fried) are carried from the kitchen to the table under the watchful eyes of Charlie Parker and Muddy Waters, who look down from posters on the wall. Also on the wall, sharing space with the standard FC Barcelona crest and a photo of a castell (Catalan human tower) in front of the old Sant Antoni Market, is Bo Diddley’s guitar.

After last week’s horrific terror attack, Barcelona’s Las Ramblas are back to life: candles, flowers and messages written on any available surface share the place with a dense river of humanity walking along the boulevard or having a coffee in one of its terraces. Instead of giving in to fear or hate, Barcelonans have made a defiant show of sticking to their summer routine of going out and taking advantage of their city’s abundant outdoor spaces, turning them into places of healing. With this response in mind, we dedicate our guide to outdoor dining in Barcelona to the victims of last week’s attack and to the multitudes of people that, in all their cultural diversity, always were and will be the peaceful essence of Las Ramblas de Barcelona.

Sants is a working neighborhood with an industrial past and a communal present, both of which it proudly flaunts. There are the street names – like L’Espanya Industrial, Carrer Wat (dedicated to the engineer James Watt) and Vapor Vell (Old Steam) – that tell the story of industrialization in Catalonia, and the two buzzing municipal markets and the many bodegas and restaurants, like Terra de Escudella or Bodega Salvat, that serve as meeting points for an engaged community. Although shaped by a diverse set of international influences, the neighborhood’s sophisticated culinary scene is tied together by something more local: vermut culture.

Every summer, sellers hawking bolas de Berlim – custard-filled doughnuts without a hole in the middle – throng to Portuguese beaches. Plodding across the boiling sand and ringing a bell to announce their arrival, they deliver these beautifully simple pastries to hungry beachgoers, many of whom associate a trip to the coast with the sweet treat. A slew of bolas are sold on the beach each year; the presumed number is almost as eyebrow-raising as the calorie content of a big fat bola filled with custard. It’s no surprise, then, that an app promising to be the Uber of bolas has been an immediate success.

The streets are nearly empty. As light cascades down cobbled thoroughfares, dog walkers shield their eyes and market-goers tow their rickety carts toward Mercado de la Bretxa. The market of San Sebastián sits underneath a square just a pebble’s skip from crashing waves surging up the mouth of the Urumea Itsasadarra River. Lamps glowing red illuminate butchers navigating dangling strings of txistorra, Basque chorizo, while across the aisle, an bright white storefront advertises every imaginable form of bacalao, or salt cod. Tucked in a rear corner, Bar Azkena has been crafting delicate fluffy breakfasts for nearly 20 years. Tortillas, or omelets, stuffed with surprises like squid ink and blood sausage fill the bar counter, necessitating foldout tabletops and overflow seating across the aisle.

Some sociologists say that Spanish society and culture can’t be properly understood without spending time in its bars. You can find bars in mountain refuges, subway stations, on the beach and by the highway. In Barcelona, there are as many bars as taxis and ten times more bars than bookshops. In fact, a recent study by Coca-Cola found that in Spain there’s a bar for every 132 Spaniards. The same study points out that a third of Spaniards wouldn’t hesitate to leave their house keys at their local bar and that two-thirds of them are on a first-name basis with the employees there.

Between two simple slices of bread exists a mind-boggling array of possibilities – something not lost on Spaniards, who have turned sandwich making into something of an art form. In Spain, sandwiches go by different names depending on the kind of bread used and local custom. The type that’s generally called a bocadillo in Spanish and entrepà in Catalan traditionally comes on pan de barra, itself a broad category of bread, with varying dimensions, qualities and more specific names, including baguette, maybe chapata (ciabatta), depending on how round the bakery makes it, pistola (pistol) in Madrid and flautas (flutes) in Barcelona if it’s short and very thin.

At the beginning, Gelida was just a bodega where Joan Llopart i Figueres, who came from the village of Gelida in Penedés, offered Catalan wine, cold cuts and a few traditional Catalan dishes cooked by his grandmother, like butifarra amb mongetas (boiled sausage with beans). Llopart i Figueres and his wife worked here until they were in their 80s. They were succeeded by their two children, Teresa and Alberto, who have always been involved in the family business and who continue to run the place today alongside their respective spouses, Josep and Luci. Alberto and Luci’s son, Gerard, helps to manage the restaurant, and Laura and Santi, family friends who live nearby, joined the team in recent years as dining room manager and chef.

When Edu, owner of the Barcelona wine bar Celler Cal Marino, was growing up in the 1980s in the neighborhood of Sant Antoni, he would confuse Rafel Jordana with the iconic German soccer player and coach Bern Schuster (“Schuster is in the bar, daddy!”). Jordana, owner of the bodega that bears his name, is not so famous internationally, but he is undoubtedly one of the icons of Sant Antoni and of the old-school bodega-bar culture in Barcelona. La Bodega d’en Rafel has served as a location for a number of films and television series (such as “Cites,” the Catalan version of “Dates”), a subject of many articles and profiles and an important touchstone for a larger community that connects Barcelona locals with their identity.

We consider ourselves fabulously lucky every time we snatch up one of the ten counter stools or the three-seater table inside the triangular shaped and miniscule Savoy Pizza. Up a few steps as the street curves around behind itself, this smallest of small restaurants is easily missed; the space seems carved out of the corner of a building, almost like the bow of a ship. The best way to find it is to look for the clutch of hungry people hanging around outside, waiting for their slice of Neapolitan-style heaven. It is the kind of place that one is told about and then hesitates to tell more people lest the line outside never end.

A bodega can be a corner store or a corner bar, or sometimes even a wine cellar with a small kitchen serving refined riffs on traditional Spanish foods. In Barcelona, a bodega is all of these, but most of all it is the beating heart of the neighborhood.

Editor’s note: We’re celebrating another year of excellent backstreets eating by taking a look back at our favorite restaurants and dishes of 2015. La Panxa del Bisbe Xavi Codina has created a menu of almost 30 tapas or platillos (small dishes) and four desserts, combining traditional Catalan cuisine with international influences that Codina has encountered in his life or in the neighborhood. Much of the menu changes according to season and customers’ tastes, but there are a few perennial favorites, such as the homey croquettes, with their generous quantity of chicken and carrots; duck liver with pears and wine; and the cap i pota, a traditional dish made from pork trotters and head, which the chef tweaks throughout the year.

National Route 246 is one of Japan’s main byways, stretching for over 76 miles and snaking through the center of Tokyo. The small part of Route 246 that runs between Shibuya and the Meijii Jingu Shrine was recently recreated for one of the best-selling video games of all time, Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec. It also happens to be the location for the food court heaven known as Commune 246.

Manolo, the protagonist of Juan Marsé’s 1965 novel, Last Evenings with Teresa, possibly the saddest Spanish love novel ever written, spends a great deal of his time drinking and playing cards with the local elders in Las Delicias. Well known to locals and Marsé’s devotees but unknown to many Barcelonans, this bar was founded in the Carmel neighborhood in the mid-1920s using a natural cave that was turned into a bomb shelter built just below the republican air defenses during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). El Carmel, a working-class neighborhood on Rovira hill with spectacular views over the city, was home to the Andalusian, Galician, Aragonese, Castilian and Extremaduran immigrants who moved to Barcelona looking for brighter futures during the postwar years, the 1960s and ’70s. Las Delicias soon became their favorite local eatery, as portions were larger than usual. Decades later, portions are still very generous, the bar is still a neighborhood institution and the menu still reflects the origins of those who once settled down here. There are Andalucian specialties such as calamares a la andaluza (deep-fried squid, €6.50), morcilla de Jaén (pork blood sausage, €1.60) and pincho moruno (marinated chicken on a skewer, €4.50); Galician specialties like pimientos de Padrón (€5.25), lacón con cachelos (boiled pork shank, €7) and pulpo a la gallega (boiled octopus, €13.95); Aragonese longaniza (pork sausage, €5.25) and Castilian callos (beef tripe stew, €5.25).