Legend has it that a certain inn was known for the quality and cheapness of its meat dishes.

(Please note: No AI was used in my translation of this article.)

There are two old mansions on a Barcelona street named Pou de la Figuera.

They seem to stand somewhat isolated among the many modern buildings that surround them, between the unrecognisable Serra Xic street and the gardens popularly known as the Forat de la Vergonya [or “pit of shame”].

With just a glance across this place, any passer-by can see the traces of what took away so many old houses, and so many lifelong neighbourhoods. Here things began with a PERI – Special Plan for Interior Reform – which was aiming to restore a historic neighbourhood. It ended with new blocks of flats.

Although totally unexpected, after violent confrontations with the Guardia Urbana [police], the local residents managed to get this public square, the only green space in their neighbourhood.

I suspect that these houses and the small alley between them, which is the subject of an urban legend about a murderous barber…must have been saved in the process.

Specifically, we are interested in the narrow alley that comes out of Pou de la Figuera, administratively-speaking, Number 14. It’s said to have been called Massada or Massades in the past [meaning “farm”] but now it has the same name as the street it crosses.

Popular belief has it that there was an inn on this very spot, where a bloody episode took place. The story bears a considerable resemblance to Sweeney Todd, a TV serial, a play, a musical by Stephen Sondheim, and a film by Tim Burton.

The plot is repeated in several European tales, such as the nineteenth-century The Pie-Maker of Human Flesh and the Murderous Barber, which set the action in fifteenth-century Paris.

A very similar plot is also found in Espill o Llibre de les dones by Jaume Roig, which set it in the same city and century.

Roig did not include the barber, but all the main themes were already mentioned, from the sale of meat pies to the mechanism that opened a trapdoor through which the victims fell…on their way to the oven.

The story overlaps with the female character (in Sweeney Todd, Miss Lovett), who was a Parisian innkeeper and her daughters. They were finally arrested when a customer found a finger in a pie. According to this author, “from the guts they made sausages, the richest and finest in the whole world”, and in a pit “deep as a well, they put the fleshless bones, legs and heads”.

The barber was in charge of choosing the victims from among his poorest customers.

Such stories are embedded in the narratives of “red inns”, which recall the occasional cannibalism practised on the European continent in times of great famine. These tales tell of an innkeeper who robs and murders his customers, and then cooks their flesh for his ignorant diners.

It is a variant of Hansel and Gretel’s ogre that recalls the years of the High Middle Ages, “when the strong devoured the weak, butchered them, roasted them and ate them”, in a terrifying description by the medieval monk Raoul Gabler.

The Barcelona version tells that there was a famous inn in Carrer del Pou de la Figuera, known for the quality and cheapness of its meat dishes. The clientele did not know it, but the secret of that delicious taste was in the raw material. According to Joan Amades (one of those who picked up this legend), “human meat has a very delicate flavour, superior to any other”.

The inn shared its premises with a barber’s shop, and the two businessmen apparently formed a partnership. The barber would choose his victims from among his most [economically] disadvantaged customers, those whose disappearance [he thought] no one would notice. He would slit their throats and throw their bodies into a cellar, where the innkeeper would cut them up and cook them.

Everything was going swimmingly, until the barber had the evil idea of inviting a homeless man passing in the street for a shave.

The good man accepted willingly, but a bad feeling kept him on his toes. Just as he was about to get the lethal slash, the beggar stopped his attacker.

They struggled and the murderer fell through the trapdoor, being pickled and stewed by the innkeeper-accomplice who did not recognise him. The wanderer-beggar was able to escape and alert the police.

As a result of his visit to the police, the long-time traveller was executed and the inn was demolished to erase its memory.

And out of that demolition came this dead end.

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[The above article is my translation of this piece by XAVIER THEROS in El Pais from 2015

 https://elpais.com/ccaa/2015/08/25/catalunya/1440528461_771891.html]