Most of the city’s rooftops come attached to a hotel, which means that whatever you’re drinking, you’re drinking it inside somebody’s amenity. Enter NIMURA, which sits on top of a paper shop.
The paper shop is Raima, and calling it that undersells it. Núria Raja opened it on Carrer Comtal in 1986, having worked out that a city full of designers, architects and illustrators had nowhere serious to buy paper. It has since spread across six floors of a building whose bones go back to 1513; a renovation left the original 16th-century walls exposed. Today it bills itself as the largest stationery store in Europe, and NIMURA is what happens at the top of it.
The framing is a meeting place for artists and creatives rather than a bar that happens to have a view, and the space is built for it: a gallery, a hall of around 220 square meters wired for sound and video, a bar, a terrace and the roof above. Programming runs on three things – music, art and drinks. Expect artist demonstrations, workshops with established and emerging makers, talks and concerts from people working in Barcelona right now. Even the furniture is second-hand, reclaimed and restored in-house, which puts it of a piece with the shop below, where everything on the shelves is raw material and somebody else is meant to make something of it.
Come up for a drink and you’ll probably end up at something. That’s rather the point.