Colombian Nobel prize-winning novelist Gabriel García Marquez and prestigious architect and urban planner Oriol Bohigas are among the many famous people known to have acquired apartments overlooking this potentially elegant square, a chiaroscuro masterpiece in which formal neoclassical symmetry clashes with rampant big-city street squalor. Plaça Reial is bordered by stately ocher facades with balconies overlooking the wrought-iron Fountain of the Three Graces and treelike, snake-infested lampposts designed by Gaudí in 1879. Third-rate cafés and restaurants line the square, although the ragtag assembly of buskers, thieves, and homeless who occupy the benches on sunny days makes hanging out here uncomfortable. Plaça Reial is most colorful on Sunday morning, when crowds gather to sell and trade stamps and coins; after dark it's a center of downtown nightlife for the jazz-minded, the young, and the adventurous. Tarantos has top flamenco performances; and Jamboree is a regular venue for world-class jazz.