Le Cool is an independent publishing company. It started in Barcelona in 2003, founded by René Lönngren, with a simple and slightly stubborn idea: that the best way to find out what was worth doing in a city was to ask someone who lived there and had good taste.
That became a weekly email. Then nine of them — Barcelona, Budapest, Dublin, Istanbul, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Rome and Moscow — read by around two hundred thousand people at its peak. Along the way we printed five Weird & Wonderful guides, to Barcelona, Amsterdam, Lisbon, London and Madrid, and made magazines for other people who wanted their cities described properly.
Every edition was written by people who lived in the city. Not stringers, not a central desk in another country, and never a scraped events feed with the serial numbers filed off. If a thing was in Le Cool, an editor had usually been to it.
What changed
The city guide, as a form, got optimised into mush. Search for something to do in almost any city now and you get the same forty attractions in a different order, ranked mostly by who spent the most on getting there. The listings are scraped, the reviews are farmed, and the hidden gem has forty thousand of them.
Meanwhile the incumbent that defined the category spent the last decade becoming a chain of food halls. That is a perfectly good business. It is not a city guide.
What didn't
Barcelona never stopped. It has kept publishing through all of it — the same weekly rhythm, the same brief, more than twenty years in. It is the proof that the format still works, and the reason we are confident about bringing the rest of the network back.
So that is what we are doing. One city at a time, starting with the ones where the most people are already asking.
A guide to the really good life