The Josepets: Where Gràcia Got Its Name
Why is it significant?
Across the wide, busy junction of Plaça de Lesseps, look for a small stone church with a plain façade, almost lost among the traffic and the apartment blocks. Locals call it the Josepets, and it gave its name to everything you have seen today.
Key Facts
| Place | The Josepets: Where Gràcia Got Its Name |
|---|---|
| Address | Plaça de Lesseps, 08023 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.40680, 2.14870 |
| Part of Walk | Gràcia, the Village Inside Barcelona: Squares, Rebels and Gaudí's First House |
| Generated | Generated |
Across the wide, busy junction of Plaça de Lesseps, look for a small stone church with a plain façade, almost lost among the traffic and the apartment blocks. Locals call it the Josepets, and it gave its name to everything you have seen today.
In 1626 Discalced Carmelite friars founded a convent here, dedicated to Our Lady of Grace, the Mare de Déu de Gràcia, and to Saint Joseph. The friars were nicknamed the Josepets, the little Josephs. Around their convent, on the road up from Barcelona, a scatter of farms, inns and summer houses slowly grew into a village, and the village took its name from the convent's Virgin: Gràcia.
The convent itself did not survive the nineteenth century. In the 1830s, when Spain's liberal governments dissolved most religious orders and sold off their property, the friars had to leave, and the convent buildings around the church disappeared. The church remained, much of it dating from the seventeenth century, and with it the name.
The square in front carries another surprising name: Ferdinand de Lesseps, the Frenchman who later built the Suez Canal. In 1842, as French consul in Barcelona, he helped shelter residents caught up in the bombardment of the city, and Barcelona remembered him for it. A canal builder from France and a Carmelite Virgin, side by side at the top of Gràcia... the neighbourhood's talent for unlikely names, right to the end.
Uphill from here, a steep walk away, Gaudí's Park Güell spreads across the slopes, but that is a story for another day. You began at Casa Fuster on the edge of the Eixample and climbed through the squares of a town that never quite agreed to become a district: the iron market, the rebel bell, the novel's square, Gaudí's first house. Lesseps metro station is right here, on the very line that first tied Gràcia to the city centre in 1924.