The best clubs in Barcelona: Razzmatazz, Nitsa, Macarena and Moog

The best clubs in Barcelona now.

These four clubs recur in current Barcelona guides, but they serve different nights out. Check the specific event before choosing: a multi-room club, a named party inside a concert hall and a small DJ room do not promise the same music every night.

For the date you are going, check the club's own programme and Resident Advisor's Barcelona listings. Opening hours, line-ups and door policy can change by event.

Zeleste, Razzmatazz and the room that grew out of a live venue.

Zeleste opened in 1973 on Carrer d'Argenteria, in Barcelona's old town, as a live-music venue rather than a club. It ran there for close to three decades before it closed.

Razzmatazz opened in 2000 as Zeleste's named heir, in a former industrial building in the Poblenou district on the other side of the city, and it is now Barcelona's biggest club: five separate rooms, each running its own music policy on a given night, from techno and house to indie and pop. It takes its name from the Pulp song, and Wikipedia records the Flaming Lips as the first act to play the venue. Razzmatazz's scale, not any single genre, is what makes it the head of Barcelona's current club scene: no other room in the city runs five different nights under one roof.

Sala Apolo and Nitsa.

Sala Apolo, on Carrer Nou de la Rambla, has changed use since the early twentieth century. Before becoming today’s concert hall, it operated as a public ice rink, officially inaugurated in September 1951.

Nitsa, one of Barcelona's first electronic club nights and still one of the best techno clubs in Barcelona, began as a weekly party in 1993 (some sources give 1994), then moved into Sala Apolo in September 1996, where it still runs. It is still listed on DJ Mag's Top 100 Clubs, not for the building but for the night itself: a room that has kept a serious electronic booking policy inside a much older concert hall for three decades.

Macarena Club: a flamenco tablao that became a dance-music room.

Macarena Club, just off La Rambla, has kept its name since the 1920s, when the same address operated as a flamenco tablao rather than a nightclub. It was refurbished in 2001 into what Resident Advisor calls one of the smallest, most tightly run rooms in the city: a single dance floor, capacity of about 300, and a DJ booth close enough to the crowd that a set there feels closer to a house party than a club night. Its music policy today is electronic dance music, a full turn from the room's flamenco original.

Hear Barcelona before you go.

That is Barcelona's club scene from the outside, filmed for a touring series rather than a single room. From the inside, here is one more route through the same night.

For the rest, the Selector plays a set at random from all 72,458 in the catalogue behind this site, which is a faster way into a night out than one more ranked list.