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Amid El Born’s web of streets are all sorts of art and design shops. Passeig del Born and Carrer Rec are dotted with innovative little galleries (from sculpture to interior design), plus clothing and shoe boutiques.

Aimed at the slightly older women’s market, El Piano has a sumptuous array of clothes. The range covers hippy chic to pretty, elegant and stylish workwear.

The best of Barcelona’s flea markets, Els Encants (east of the city) is where you’ll find everything you want – and don’t want – from second-hand clothes, furniture, toys and electrical appliances to home-made pottery and stacks of used books. Discerning browsers can fit out an entire kitchen from an array of pots, pans and utensils. Bargain-hunters should come early.

Exhibits at this architecture and design gallery and bookstore include architectural models, video installations and graphic design.

Plaça de Sant Josep Oriol & Plaça del Pi (The Plaça del Pi) brims with natural and organic foods during the Fira Artesana, when producers bring their goods to this corner of the Barri Gòtic. The market specializes in home-made cheeses and honey – from clear clover honey from the Pyrenees to nutty concoctions from Morella.

Spread out in the elegant Plaça Reial (Plaça Reial), this popular stamp and coin market draws avid collectors from all over the city. The newest collectors’ items are phone cards and old xapes de cava (cava bottle cork foils). When the market ends (and the local police go to lunch), a makeshift flea market takes over. Old folks from the barrio and immigrants haul out their belongings – old lamps, clothing, junk – and lay it all out on cloths on the ground.

The Christmas season is officially under way when local artisans set up shop outside the Cathedral for the annual Christmas fair. Well worth a visit if only to peruse the row upon row of caganers, miniature figures squatting to fer caca (take a poop). Uniquely Catalan, the caganers are usually hidden in the back of nativity scenes. This unusual celebration of the scatological also appears in other Christmas traditions.