Literature has long served as an inducement to travel. The merging of real qualities and tourists’ imagination gives a special meaning to literary places, indeed often leading a romantic re-invention of sites. Barcelona is one of those places with a literary tradition and reputation that have inspired many writers. In turn, their urban narratives have contributed to a kind of literary construction of Barcelona that affects how the city is perceived. Widely read urban narratives like Ruiz Zafón’s "The Shadow of the Wind" serve as an invitation for travellers to meet the city through the writer’s eyes, even moti-vating Barcelona’s tourism services to develop "Shadow of the Wind" guided walking tours. The tours can be regarded as an attempt to densify a romanticized imagination of a magical Barcelona in today’s cityscape and to produce a specific text of the city. This kind of "writing the city" determines a hegemonic kind of "reading the city" by the tourist.

This chapter analyses tourists’ spatial practices with the help of Lefebvre’s and de Certeau’s theories of the production of space, to show how tourists are involved in the literary construction of Barcelona as a "lieu d’imagination".