Dog Walkers in Barcelona, Spain

Living with a dog in Barcelona means negotiating with density. The Eixample has one of the tightest urban grids in Europe, and its chamfered blocks, however elegantly resolved, provide no green space: the neighbour on a third floor with no lift comes down four times a day to a pavement shared with café terraces, scooters and tourists. Which is why dog walking professionalised earlier here than almost anywhere else in the country.

The city compensates with two things no other Spanish capital has. The first is Collserola: a natural park of more than eight thousand hectares pressed literally against the urban fabric, reachable by the Ferrocarrils from Plaça Catalunya in twenty minutes. A dog setting out from Gràcia can be on a forest track before it would have finished crossing the centre of another city. The second is the sea. Barcelona opened a dog bathing area on Platja de Llevant, and that changes the summer of any animal that loves water.

The rest is a matter of timetables. Mediterranean humidity makes thirty degrees in July feel worse than a dry thirty-five, and the heat index through the midday band is hardest on flat-faced breeds and older dogs. Winter, by contrast, offers little excuse: it rarely drops below five degrees and walking stays comfortable all year round.

Barcelona also has an unusually strong neighbourhood culture. Its districts work like villages — Gràcia and Poblenou are the obvious examples — and a sitter working in one of them usually lives ten minutes away, knows the vet on the corner and knows which dog areas fill up at which hour. That closeness is, in practice, the best quality filter there is.