Torre del Rellotge: The Fishermen's Wharf
Why is it significant?
From the quayside, look across to the slender stone tower with a clock face near the top, rising above the moorings. Below it, the colourful fishing boats are tied up in a row, nets heaped on the decks, the gulls patrolling.
Key Facts
| Place | Torre del Rellotge: The Fishermen's Wharf |
|---|---|
| Address | Passeig de Joan de Borbó, facing the Moll de Pescadors, 08003 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.37530, 2.18660 |
| Part of Walk | Barceloneta and the Sea: Barcelona's Fishermen, Bombas and Beaches |
| Generated | Generated |
From the quayside, look across to the slender stone tower with a clock face near the top, rising above the moorings. Below it, the colourful fishing boats are tied up in a row, nets heaped on the decks, the gulls patrolling. In the middle of a harbour full of yachts and cruise ships, this is the corner where Barcelona still fishes.
The tower began its life as a lighthouse. It was built in the eighteenth century to mark the end of the old port's breakwater, when this was the very tip of the harbour. Then the port kept growing, new docks pushed out into the sea, the light was left standing inland, useless, and later the city gave it a new job and a clock. Today it is the Torre del Rellotge, the Clock Tower, and it presides over the Moll de Pescadors, the Fishermen's Wharf.
If you come in the late afternoon, you may see the trawlers coming home. The boxes of fish go to auction on the wharf and are sold the same day: hake, red mullet, prawns, cuttlefish, monkfish. This is the beginning of the chain that ends on your plate in the restaurants of Barceloneta.
And the fishermen's own food was the cleverest of all. The best fish was sold, so the crews cooked what was left: the bony rockfish, the broken prawns, the heads. From those came the deep stocks that flavour Catalan seafood rice, and the fish stew called suquet. There is a joke, too, about arròs del senyoret, the gentleman's rice, which arrives with every prawn already peeled, because a gentleman, the story goes, must never get his fingers dirty at the table.
Fishing has shrunk enormously here, as everywhere in the Mediterranean, and the fleet is a fraction of what it was a century ago. But the boats still go out. Now continue south along the Passeig de Joan de Borbó, towards the tall steel tower with cables running out across the harbour.