He was doing this on a stage first.

David Magaña is a working actor in Barcelona. Atoura't is his: he writes the tours, he leads them himself, and he is the person almost every review is about.

Four of the five are guided walks, in the plain sense of the phrase. He turns up as himself, in his own clothes, and tells you what happened where it happened. What the training changes is the telling, not the costume: an actor knows how to hold ten people in a small square without a microphone, when to shut up, and how to land an argument instead of a list of dates.

One of the five is performed. On the Gaudí walk he arrives as Antoni Gaudí and stays there for the whole ninety minutes in front of the Sagrada Família. That is the only one we call theatrical. This website used to call all five theatrical, which was not true; David said so himself and it has been put right.

The difference from a normal walking tour is not that yours has costumes. It is that nobody reads you a Wikipedia page outdoors. You stand in Plaça de la Vila, under the tower whose bell cracked in 1870, and you get told why it rang by someone who can make you care.

The history is not loosened up to fit the drama. The bell, the bombardment from Montjuïc, the annexation of April 1897, the tile manufacturer who took a chance on an unknown 31-year-old architect — all of it is documented and none of it needed embellishing. It was already a better story than most things anyone invents.