A city read neighbourhood by neighbourhood
Barcelona has been written on top of itself: a Roman wall under a medieval square, a stream turned into a promenade, a plain of fields that becomes a grid, a mountain of exhibitions and games. This page gathers ten places and tries to read, in each one, the layer underneath.
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Barcelona is good if your purse is sounding.
Catalan proverb
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Foundations
Under the paving stones there is Barcino. The Roman city was founded around 10 BC on a modest hill, Mont Tàber, and its perimeter can still be traced today: the fourth-century wall shows up, in pieces, in Plaça Nova, in Plaça Ramon Berenguer el Gran, in Carrer del Sotstinent Navarro. In Carrer del Paradís, inside a narrow courtyard of the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya, four columns of the temple of Augustus are still standing where they were planted. What we call Gothic is, in good part, a restoration: between 1908 and the nineteen-fifties façades were moved, squares were opened and the neo-Gothic bridge of Carrer del Bisbe was built, which dates from 1928. The quarter is authentic and theatrical at the same time, and that mixture is precisely what makes it interesting.
1 Ciutat Vella · Roman foundation, c. 10 BC
Proportion
It is a church of merchants, raised in the Ribera quarter between 1329 and 1383 under the direction of Berenguer de Montagut. Fifty-four years: for a medieval cathedral that is the blink of an eye, and that speed explains why the whole building speaks the same language. Catalan Gothic does not look for the dizzying height of the French kind but for width; here the three naves are almost the same height and the octagonal columns stand thirteen metres apart, the widest span in all European Gothic architecture. The result is a space that does not climb, but opens. The stone came from the Montjuïc quarry on the shoulders of the bastaixos, the dockers of the port, and they are still remembered, carved on the bronze doors.
2 La Ribera · 1329-1383
Current
Before it was a promenade it was a stream. The word rambla comes from the Arabic ramla, "sandy ground", and it named the dry bed down which the water ran when it rained, pressed against the medieval wall. In the eighteenth century the wall was pulled down, the torrent was covered over, and what had been a boundary became the centre. One kilometre and two hundred metres separate Plaça de Catalunya from the Columbus monument, and along the way there is the Boqueria market, roofed with an iron structure in 1914, the Gran Teatre del Liceu, opened in 1847 and burnt down twice, and the mosaic Joan Miró made in the pavement of Pla de l'Os in 1976, walked over every day by thousands of people who do not know they are stepping on it. La Rambla is still what it has always been: a place things come down.
3 Ciutat Vella · 1.2 km
Grid
It is the most ambitious idea anyone has ever had about this city. When the walls were demolished in 1854, Barcelona was one of the densest cities in Europe, and in 1859 the engineer Ildefons Cerdà drew up a grid of blocks 113 metres on a side that stretched across the plain until it touched the villages around it. Cerdà had studied how the working class lived and how it died before drawing a single street, and his plan was a sanitary one: streets twenty metres wide, sun and air for everybody, building on only two sides of each block and a garden in the middle. The layout was built but the generosity was not, and the inner courtyards filled up. What did survive is the xamfrà, that forty-five degree cut at every corner that gives the Eixample its unexpected octagonal little squares and which is, probably, the most copied urban detail of Barcelona.
4 Cerdà Plan · 1859
Patience
It has been under construction for more than a hundred and forty years. Work began in 1882 with a conventional neo-Gothic project by another architect; Antoni Gaudí took charge of the temple in 1883, aged thirty-one, and gave it the remaining forty-three years of his life, the last twelve exclusively, living in the workshop itself. He died in 1926, run over by a tram, and the temple was a quarter finished. Gaudí did not draw so much as build: he hung cords weighted with little bags of shot to find, upside down, the exact shape that carries the load without buttresses. It is still funded by alms and tickets, like a medieval cathedral, and that slowness is not an accident but the method.
5 L'Eixample · since 1882
Fragments
It was born as a property failure. Eusebi Güell wanted an estate of sixty plots on the Muntanya Pelada, away from the smoke, in the manner of the English garden cities he admired, which is why it is spelt with the English k. Between 1900 and 1914 only two were sold. The city bought it in 1922 and opened it as a public park, and so what was meant to be a closed neighbourhood ended up belonging to everyone. What remains is Gaudí in his purest form: the viaducts of undressed stone that seem to grow out of the slope, the hypostyle hall of eighty-six columns that collects the rainwater and leads it to a cistern, and the undulating bench of the upper terrace, covered in trencadís, mosaic made from broken and discarded tile, largely the work of Josep Maria Jujol.
6 La Salut, Gràcia · 1900-1914
Sea
It is a neighbourhood made of reclaimed land and of evicted people. In the eighteenth century the Bourbon army demolished a good part of La Ribera to build the Ciutadella there, and the expelled population ended up on a triangle of silted sand beside the port. In 1753 the military engineer Juan Martín Cermeño laid out a strict grid of small, low houses, all alike, meant to let the sun in from both sides; over the years floors were added and the light was lost. Until 1992 the sea was behind the factories and the railway lines. The Olympic Games opened up the seafront, created four kilometres of beach where there had been warehouses, and turned the city, for the first time in centuries, to face the water.
7 Ciutat Vella · 1753
Stage
Almost a hundred and eighty-five metres of sandstone that have served for everything: quarry for the Romans and for the builders of Santa Maria del Mar, Jewish cemetery — which is probably where the name comes from — military castle that has pointed its cannon at the city more often than away from it, and finally a park. The International Exposition of 1929 left behind the Palau Nacional, Carles Buïgas's magic fountain and Mies van der Rohe's German pavilion, dismantled in 1930 and rebuilt stone by stone in 1986. The 1992 Games came back with the Olympic Stadium and Calatrava's communications tower. It is the mountain from which Barcelona has explained itself to the world twice in the same century.
8 Sants-Montjuïc · 184.8 m
Village
It was an independent town until 1897, and it still looks like one. When the Eixample reached its houses, Gràcia already had a street plan of its own, narrower and more crooked, and a network of squares — Plaça de la Vila, Plaça del Sol, Plaça de la Virreina, Plaça del Diamant — that work as open-air living rooms. The streets carry names from the liberal and republican revolt of the nineteenth century, and the bell tower in Plaça de la Vila rang the alarm more than once. Every August, during the festa major, the neighbours dress the streets from top to bottom with recycled material and compete to see which one comes out best: a tradition that goes back to 1817 and which is still, above all, the business of the people who live there.
9 Gràcia · annexed in 1897
Viewpoint
It is the highest point of the Collserola range, five hundred and twelve metres, and from the top you understand at a glance the geography that explains everything: a plain sloping between two rivers, the Besòs and the Llobregat, closed off by the range and open to the sea. The name comes from the Latin of the gospel, haec omnia tibi dabo, "all this I will give you", which is what the devil says to Jesus from a high mountain. Doctor Andreu brought the blue tram up here in 1901 and the funicular the same year, and opened an amusement park that is still running with some of its original machines, among them the aeroplane of 1928. Beside it, the temple of the Sagrat Cor, finished in 1961, and beyond that Norman Foster's Collserola tower, of 1992, which is the mast the city's silhouette hangs from.
10 Collserola · 512 m
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