What did Barcelona tear down, move, plan or invent in each era?
6 walks with different starting points and stories. Compare their maps, stops and duration, then choose where to begin.
Explore these walks
Barcelona was also made through demolition, relocation, planning and rebuilding. These walks follow those operations to explain why a street or neighbourhood looks the way it does today. The theme compares periods and decisions, paying attention to what disappeared and what was presented as new, old or representative of the city.
In “Santa Maria del Mar and the Born”: Streets beneath the market and the change from fortress to park let you compare successive uses of the same urban spaces.
In “From the Palau to Ciutadella”: From the Palau de la Música to the Ciutadella cascade: one night in 1960, noble nuns and a prison, the 1888 fair that almost didn't open, statues melted down for a Virgin, and a mammoth with no company.
In “Gaudí and Passeig de Gràcia”: You walk down past the lamp-post benches that everyone attributes to Gaudí (they aren't his), find out why the writer Víctor Balaguer gave these streets the names of the old Crown of Aragon, and reach Carrer d'Aragó, with a railway underneath.
Choose from 6 independent walks in Barcelona. Open the one that interests you to see its map, stops and approximate duration before deciding. You don't need to do them all or follow this selection's order; each walk has its own starting and finishing points.
Open a marker to see its page. Use two fingers to move the map on mobile.
Down by the beach, a stone bearing a woman's name, the fountain of Carmen Amaya, born in the shacks of the Somorrostro, the bathhouses and beach eating houses of the past, and the wooden school run by its pupils until the bombs of 1938.
From the Palau de la Música to the Ciutadella cascade: one night in 1960, noble nuns and a prison, the 1888 fair that almost didn't open, statues melted down for a Virgin, and a mammoth with no company.
The avenue in front of the cathedral was opened up by post-war demolitions that took advantage of the bombing of 1938; the façade everyone photographs was paid for by a banker at the end of the nineteenth century.
You walk down past the lamp-post benches that everyone attributes to Gaudí (they aren't his), find out why the writer Víctor Balaguer gave these streets the names of the old Crown of Aragon, and reach Carrer d'Aragó, with a railway underneath.
Streets beneath the market and the change from fortress to park let you compare successive uses of the same urban spaces.
By the pond, the field a bookseller bought for a church paid for only with alms; at the Nativity façade, the only tower Gaudí saw finished, the tortoises beneath the columns and the angels a stonemason from Japan remade after the war destroyed the models.
A city worth looking up for, with pavements worth watching too. Between narrow lanes, long avenues and a break by the sea, leave room in the day to sit down.
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