Gothic Quarter: Roman, Royal and Rebuilt

The full story of Gothic Quarter: Roman, Royal and Rebuilt, in words. Prefer to listen? Play it narrated, from home or on location.

1. 1. Plaça Nova: The Roman Gate

   Welcome to Plaça Nova, the New Square. Walk on into the open square and stop where you can see the two stone towers at the point where a narrow lane, Carrer del Bisbe, leaves it.

   Those towers mark the north-west gate of Roman Barcino. In the Middle Ages it was called the bishop's gate. It had three openings: a central way for carts, through a small court, and two covered passages for people on foot. Much of it survived inside later buildings until eighteen twenty-three, when those buildings were pulled down. The lane between the towers follows one of the Roman town's two main streets, and we walk it later.

   Now look beside the gate for a single arch on a stone pillar. Two raised water channels came in here and supplied the town. What you see is the pillar that stood outside the wall and the arch that linked it to the town, restored in nineteen fifty-eight under the architect Adolf Florensa: a heavy rebuilding, but faithful to the Roman original. The houses that leaned against this stretch of wall came down in nineteen fifty-four.

   The wall itself had two lives. It went up with the colony. Then, in the late two hundreds, it was thickened into a fortress with close to eighty towers, and to build it faster and more cheaply, old funeral monuments were fed into it as building stone.

   One more thing before you go. The modern building of Catalonia's college of architects, on the edge of the square, carries line drawings sandblasted into its concrete. They were drawn by Picasso around nineteen sixty.

   Follow the route toward the Cathedral, next door.

2. 2. Barcelona Cathedral: The Late Front

   Walk on along the open avenue and stop where the whole front of the Cathedral is in view. The Cathedral is ticketed for visitors at most hours, and the front is free to look at from here. The details are on this stop's card.

   The Gothic building was begun on the first of May, twelve ninety-eight. Over about a century and a half, the builders carried the nave to this end, and in fourteen seventeen they closed it off with a simple wall. For nearly five centuries, that plain wall was the front of Barcelona's cathedral.

   What you see now went up between eighteen eighty-seven and nineteen thirteen. A banker, Manuel Girona, offered to pay for the front and its two side towers, and his children finished the work in nineteen thirteen with the lantern tower over the crossing. Find all three: the two slim towers framing the front, and the lantern tower rising behind them. They belong to the same late campaign.

   The designers looked back to a plan from the Middle Ages. In fourteen-oh-eight a Norman master known as Carlí drew a design for the main doorway. It was never built, but his drawings on parchment survive, damaged. So the front is a nineteenth-century reading of a medieval drawing for a doorway, stretched across a whole wall.

   Keep this in mind for the rest of the walk. In the Gothic Quarter, the question is not only how old a thing looks, but when it was actually built.

   Inside, and not on this walk, is a cloister finished in fourteen forty-eight, with thirteen white geese and a fountain from the middle of the fourteen hundreds.

   Follow the route along the avenue and round the corner, toward the Roman wall.

3. 3. Roman Wall: A Chapel on a Tower

   Walk on into the garden square and stop near the statue of a rider. Then turn to face the long stone wall across the square, with square towers set into it.

   This is the Roman wall, and it is really two walls. The first went up with the colony. In the late two hundreds a second belt was built hard against it, thicker, with close to eighty towers around the town. Look at the shape of the towers: most of Barcelona's are square, where most towns in the western provinces of the empire built them round.

   Now find the slim tower rising above the wall. It belongs to the royal chapel of Santa Àgata, Saint Agatha, the chapel of the kings' palace, which you will see from the other side in a few minutes. The city's history museum has numbered the Roman towers, and the chapel's bell tower stands on tower number fifteen. The kings built straight onto Rome.

   After the Middle Ages the wall became the sturdy back wall of houses and palaces, and it disappeared behind them. In the twentieth century, when the wide avenue behind you, Via Laietana, was cut through the old city, the wall was uncovered again on this side. The museum now calls it the city's most extensive monument. In the middle of the century Adolf Florensa, the restorer of the aqueduct arch at the gate, drew up a plan for a garden along its outer face, and recent works here still follow it.

   So the wall is recycling three times over: tombstones fed into a Roman wall, a royal tower set on a Roman tower, and a monument peeled out of a row of houses.

   Follow the route out of the square and round the end of the wall, to the kings' square.

4. 4. Plaça del Rei: The King's Square

   Walk on up the lane and stop just inside Plaça del Rei, the King's Square, where it opens out. It is a dead end: no traffic, and hardly a shopfront.

   Find the fan of stone steps rising to a tall arched doorway in the corner. Behind it is the great hall of the royal palace, the Saló del Tinell, built between thirteen fifty-nine and thirteen seventy for King Peter the Ceremonious. Beside it rises the slim tower of the royal chapel of Saint Agatha, the one you just saw standing on the Roman wall. And the tall tower is a lookout.

   The great hall had a strange second life. From seventeen twenty-two to nineteen thirty-six, a convent church filled it. In nineteen thirty-six the nuns left, the next year the church inside was demolished, and the medieval hall came back to light.

   Now the Gothic house at this end of the square, home of the city history museum. It was not built here. It stood about two hundred metres away, on Carrer de Mercaders, and when Via Laietana was cut through, it was taken down and rebuilt here stone by stone, around nineteen thirty. The museum opened in it in nineteen forty-three.

   When the house was rebuilt here, digging found the Roman town under the square, and excavations ran from nineteen thirty-one to nineteen thirty-six. The museum's underground route now passes a workshop for cleaning and dyeing cloth, a factory for salting fish and making fish sauce, a winery, and the bishops' buildings of the late Roman centuries. The museum is ticketed and closed on Mondays; this stop works from the square.

   Follow the route by turning round at the mouth of the square and leaving by the same corner, down the lane called Baixada de Santa Clara. Next, the top of the Roman town.

5. 5. Temple of Augustus: Columns in a Courtyard

   Walk on along this narrow lane, Carrer del Paradís, and stop at the bend, outside the doorway of number ten. The building belongs to a hiking club, the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya, and in its courtyard stand four Roman columns. The space is free to enter and open every…

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6. 6. Plaça de Sant Jaume: Two Governments

   Walk on into Plaça de Sant Jaume and stop where you can see both of its great fronts. The palace with the statue of Saint George on its front is the Palau de la Generalitat, the seat of Catalonia's government. Facing it across the square is Barcelona's city hall, the Casa de la…

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7. 7. Pont del Bisbe: The 1928 Bridge

   Walk on up Carrer del Bisbe and stop a little short of the stone bridge that crosses the lane overhead. This is the Pont del Bisbe, the Bishop's Bridge. It is a photo bottleneck, so step to the side. This lane is the Roman main street that ran in from the gate at Plaça Nova.…

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8. 8. Plaça de Sant Felip Neri: The 1938 Raid

   Walk on into the small square and stop facing the church front. There is a school on this square, so keep your voice low. This is Plaça de Sant Felip Neri. Look at the lower stone of the church front: it is pitted and gouged. Those marks were made by bomb shrapnel. On the…

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9. 9. El Call: The Jewish Quarter

   Walk on along this narrow lane, Carrer de Marlet, and stop at its far end, by the corner. You are in El Call, Barcelona's medieval Jewish quarter. People live on these lanes, so keep your voice down and stay in the street. Call meant a small street or alley, and the word came…

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10. 10. Santa Maria del Pi: Stopped by the Plague

    Walk on into Plaça del Pi and stop where the whole front of the church, with its great round window, is in view. If branches hide the window, take a few steps toward the church. This is Santa Maria del Pi, Saint Mary of the Pine. Visitors go inside with a ticket, and you can…

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11. 11. La Rambla: Pla de la Boqueria

    Walk on down the pavement of La Rambla, on this side, and stop there by the building fronts. The Rambla is being rebuilt from end to end, and the work is due to finish in early twenty twenty-seven, so expect hoardings and fencing. Its central walk is being redone one half at a…

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12. 12. Plaça Reial: Gaudí's Lampposts

    Walk on through the arcade into Plaça Reial, the Royal Square, and stop where the fountain in the middle is in view. This is where the walk ends. A friary of Capuchin monks stood on this ground from seventeen eighteen. The square that replaced it was designed in eighteen…

    Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.