Palau de Mar: The Last Warehouse of the Old Port

Why is it significant?

Start with your back to the yachts and your face to the long brick building with its rows of arched windows and the line of restaurant terraces at its feet.

Key Facts

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Start with your back to the yachts and your face to the long brick building with its rows of arched windows and the line of restaurant terraces at its feet. Waiters are laying out paper tablecloths, someone is carrying a paella pan as wide as a cartwheel, and the air smells of salt and frying garlic. Welcome to the gateway of Barceloneta. The building is the Palau de Mar, the Palace of the Sea, though it was never a palace. It was built at the end of the nineteenth century as the general warehouses of the port, a place to store the sacks, barrels and crates that came off the ships. Of all the big warehouses that once lined these docks, it is the great survivor. Around the Olympics of 1992 it was converted, and since 1996 its upper floors have held the Museu d'Història de Catalunya, the Museum of the History of Catalonia, with a rooftop terrace over the whole harbour. Now look at the ground under your feet, because it should not exist. In the Middle Ages, all of this was open water. When Barcelona built a breakwater to shelter its port, the sea currents began to drop sand against it, year after year, and slowly a long, low sandbank grew out into the Mediterranean. The neighbourhood you are about to enter stands on land that the sea itself made by accident. And on that sandbank lived the people who fed the city from the sea: fishermen, sailors, dockers, boat builders. Their cooking is what you smell on these terraces today. Rice cooked in a rich fish stock, the stew called suquet, grilled sardines, fried baby squid. Simple food, born from whatever the boats brought in that morning, which is now among the most famous food in Barcelona. A small tip, from one friend to another: the best seafood rice is ordered at lunchtime, never at night, and a good one is never bright yellow. Now leave the waterfront, cross the Passeig de Joan de Borbó, and walk a couple of blocks into the narrow streets, to a small square with a baroque church.