Pub quiz nights in Barcelona: where to play

Ask someone in Barcelona about a "pub quiz" and, unless they're an expat or a student on Erasmus, you'll probably get a shrug. Search in Catalan or Spanish and you'll find "trivia" nights and the odd "concurso de preguntas", mostly aimed at locals rather than English speakers. The English-language pub quiz scene here is real, though. It's built around a handful of Irish pubs and craft beer bars catering to the city's huge international crowd, and it runs week to week rather than being a one-off. We went looking for the ones still actually running, checked what we could find against each venue's own page, and left out a fair few names that kept coming up in older articles once it became clear they weren't currently active. Below are the ones we're confident about.

A quick note before you make plans: bar and pub quizzes are genuinely fragile things. A quiz that's run every Thursday for years can quietly stop the moment a host leaves or a bar changes hands, and the venue's own website doesn't always get updated to reflect it. Some of the venues below list a phone number or Instagram handle for bookings, which is worth using, both to reserve a table and to double-check the night hasn't moved. Treat everything here as a solid starting point rather than gospel, especially if you're crossing the city for it.

IMPRFCTO Pub Quiz, Poble Sec

IMPRFCTO runs its original quiz on Sunday nights at 9pm at its bar on Avinguda del Paral·lel, a Belgian beer and tapas spot just off the Paral·lel metro stop. Entry is €4 a head, paid at the venue, and teams run from three to six people (bigger groups get split in two). The format leans on a rolling jackpot round: answer all five questions in it correctly and you take home whatever's built up, which the site says has been won "oh so many times." Booking is recommended, and if it's less than 24 hours before the quiz you'll need to call rather than book online.

Source: The Imprfcto Pub Quiz, home page

IMPRFCTO Pub Quiz, Poblenou

The same team runs a second quiz on Thursdays at their Poblenou bar on Carrer de Bilbao, on the other side of the city from the Paral·lel branch. It's worth flagging that the venue's own site notes it recently moved this session's start time to 7:30pm to suit an after-work crowd, which is exactly the kind of small schedule change that's easy to miss if you're going off an old listing. Same €4 entry, same team sizes and jackpot format as the Sunday session, just a different neighbourhood and night.

Source: The Imprfcto Pub Quiz, home page

If neither of those nights line up with your week, it's worth mentioning to your own local that setting up a quiz costs a bar next to nothing and is an easy way to fill a quiet evening. Or don't wait on a bar at all: build your own round of questions with our free quiz creator and run a quiz wherever suits you.

The Bullman, Eixample

The Bullman, an Irish sports bar on Carrer de Muntaner near Sant Antoni market, runs what it calls its "famous quiz night" every Thursday at 8:30pm. The winning team's prize is a bottle of Jägermeister, and the bar asks people to book a table in advance, either by phone or by direct message to its Instagram account. The page doesn't list an entry fee, so it may be free to play, but it's worth confirming when you book.

Source: The Bullman, quiz night page

Three venues is a shorter list than you'd get for London or a bigger UK city, and that's a fair reflection of the scene rather than us running out of places to look. Barcelona has plenty of quiz nights that get mentioned on travel blogs and listings sites, but several of the venues that keep coming up, including a well-known brewery near the port and at least one long-running Irish pub in El Raval, turned out to have dead or redirected websites, no current schedule we could confirm, or contradicted each other on the day and time. We've left those out rather than send you somewhere on the strength of an old blog post. If you know of a genuinely current English-language quiz night we've missed, we'd rather hear about it and add it properly than guess.

However many pubs are within reach, there's no reason to wait around for one to sort out a quiz night of its own. Put together your own set of questions with our quiz creator and run it wherever you happen to be, whether that's a rooftop, a rented flat or a bar that's never done a quiz before. We've also written a full guide on how to run a great pub quiz if you want help with pacing, round structure and keeping a mixed, multilingual room engaged for a couple of hours.