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Barcelona’s most famous food market is conveniently located on La Rambla (La Rambla). Freshness reigns supreme and shoppers are spoiled for choice, with hundreds of stalls selling everything from vine-ripened tomatoes to haunches of beef and moist wedges of Manchego cheese. The city’s seaside status is in full evidence at the fish stalls.

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.

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.

For book lovers, there’s no better way to spend Sunday morning than browsing at this market (west of the city). You’ll find a mind-boggling assortment of weathered paperbacks, ancient tomes, stacks of old magazines, comics, postcards and lots more, from coins to videos.

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.

In the heart of the Eixample is this large market, renowned for its flowers. Blooming bouquets at the entrance offer a fragrant welcome to the bright flower stalls that lie within.

Each barrio has its own food market with tempting displays but this one boasts a spectacular setting. Opened in 2005, the new building was designed by Catalan architect Enric Miralles (1955- 2000).

At weekends, local artists flock to this Barri Gòtic square to sell their art and set up their easels. You’ll find everything from water-colours of Catalan landscapes to oil paintings of churches and castles.

Antiques aficionados and collectors contentedly rummage through jewellery, watches, candelabras, silver trays, embroidery and assorted bric-a-brac at this long-running antiques market in front of the Cathedral.