Features

Mediaeval Barcelona

Cap­i­tal cities make ideal hol­i­day des­ti­na­tions and Cat­alo­nia’s cap­i­tal Barcelona can rival the best of them. Barcelona at­tracts many thou­sands of for­eign vis­i­tors every year but the city also has plenty to offer the local tourist. With its long his­tory, each new visit to Barcelona can pro­vide an un­ex­pected dis­cov­ery of a city that we might think we al­ready know very well.

This tour be­gins in the square of Plaça del Rei, a key site in the his­tory of Barcelona. For cen­turies, it was the cen­tre of a city that dur­ing the Mid­dle Ages be­came the trad­ing cap­i­tal of the Mediter­ranean and today the square is home to the Barcelona City His­tory Mu­seum.

Not far away, Barcelona’s Town Hall also dates back to the me­di­ae­val pe­riod and as a build­ing and an in­sti­tu­tion over the cen­turies it has man­aged to sur­vive cat­a­stro­phes, wars and sieges of all kinds.

Around the cor­ner is to be found the cathe­dral, which stands out among Gothic and neo-Gothic con­struc­tions and com­petes with such beau­ti­ful churches in the city’s Gothic Quar­ter as Santa Maria del Pi or the mag­nif­i­cent Santa Maria del Mar, in the Rib­era dis­trict. This is where the me­di­ae­val palaces of Car­rer Mont­cada today host mu­se­ums and art gal­leries, while a few streets away, on Via Lai­etana, Plaça Ramon Berenguer is a square that shows a har­mo­nious blend of Roman and me­di­ae­val legacy.

Ab­sorbed by the city

The old­est churches in Barcelona, Sant Pere de les Puel·les and Sant Pau del Camp, both Ro­manesque in style, re­tain the old rural essence of the vil­lages that once stood out­side Barcelona’s city walls. Over the cen­turies these vil­lages have been ab­sorbed by the city and the churches are in what are now the neigh­bour­hoods of Sant Pere and Raval.

Near the seafront, more Gothic build­ings, such as the for­mer trad­ing house known as La Llotja and the Reials Dras­sanes, or Royal Wharfs, that today house the Barcelona Mar­itime Mu­seum, point to Barcelona’s mar­itime past dur­ing the Mid­dle Ages.

Me­di­ae­val Barcelona lived en­closed by its de­fen­sive walls that were up­dated as the city grew. How­ever, by the mid­dle of the 19th cen­tury, rather than pro­tect­ing the local pop­u­la­tion, the walls kept the city’s res­i­dents crammed into densely pop­u­lated al­ley­ways where dis­eases spread rapidly. The walls had also be­come an ob­sta­cle to the city’s in­dus­trial ex­pan­sion and so the de­ci­sion was made to de­mol­ish them, and only sec­tions have sur­vived until today. With his new way of un­der­stand­ing urban life, Ilde­fons Cerdà planned a har­mo­nious and or­derly ex­ten­sion to the city known as the Eix­am­ple, which left the old me­di­ae­val area in dan­ger of falling into decay and iso­la­tion. Luck­ily, Barcelona later re­claimed and beau­ti­fied its old town and over the past few decades it has be­come one of the city’s key tourist as­sets.

out & about

Beyond the city walls

The remains of Barcelona’s mediaeval past is not only to be found in the central neighbourhood of Ciutat Vella. Far from the walls, there were several unique buildings in the Middle Ages that, with the urban growth of the 19th and 20th centuries, were finally integrated into the city. This is the case of Pedralbes Monastery. Today, the landscaped space off Diagonal avenue is a quiet and secluded oasis in a busy city.

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