Barcelona no existe

The year is 2050. Barcelona has become a crime capital, a lawless hell. Democracy has failed, the economy has collapsed, and the struggle for power has divided the city into zones controlled by different factions. In the city center, the government forces hold out, entrenched there for almost thirty years and reduced to a withered and decrepit tribe. The Eixample district is a no-man's-land, a space of freedom between the oppressive, militarized old city and the outskirts. The periphery and the abandoned metro network are in the hands of the Youth Militias, whose banner is culture and sexual liberation. A seventy-eight-year-old journalist, the last link in a profession as out of touch with reality as LSD, receives an envelope full of money from an old friend, asking him to try to restore peace through a news report. Everything becomes complicated when he is murdered. The investigation will unfold amidst neon lights, decadent orgies, undressing women, desperate prostitutes, rivers of whiskey, zombies, and depressed people… And drugs. Lots of drugs. Coke, heroin, ecstasy, amphetamines, chocolate, morphine, opium, crack, and sleeping pills serve as the backdrop to this Ballardian dystopia set in a Barcelona that ceased to exist after 1992.