Plaça de Catalunya: Where the Old City Ends

Why is it significant?

You are standing in the great open hinge of Barcelona, Plaça de Catalunya, with its fountains, its pigeons and its tide of people pouring out of the metro. Behind you, to the south, the narrow lanes of the old city begin. Ahead, wide straight avenues march away towards the hills.

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You are standing in the great open hinge of Barcelona, Plaça de Catalunya, with its fountains, its pigeons and its tide of people pouring out of the metro. Behind you, to the south, the narrow lanes of the old city begin. Ahead, wide straight avenues march away towards the hills. For most of its history, none of this was a square at all. Until the middle of the nineteenth century Barcelona was squeezed inside its medieval walls, one of the most crowded cities in Europe, and the ground under your feet was open land outside the gates, where the army forbade anyone to build. When the walls finally came down, from 1854, this field became the joint between two cities: the old one, and a new one that did not exist yet. For decades it stayed an awkward no-man's-land of stalls, shacks and quarrels about who owned what and what should go here. The square you see was only properly laid out in the 1920s, in time for the International Exposition of 1929. That is why it feels less like a grand planned piazza and more like a crossroads that grew into its own importance. Look for the strange monument on the side facing Rambla de Catalunya: a stone staircase turned upside down, climbing towards nothing. It is Josep Maria Subirachs's tribute to Francesc Macià, the president of the Catalan government in the early 1930s, unveiled in 1991. People read it in different ways... a stair that has to be built step by step, or a reminder that history does not always lead where you expect. This walk is about what happened when the city finally burst out of its walls: textile fortunes, a brilliant engineer's grid, and a handful of architects who turned one avenue into an open-air competition. But before the big names, a quieter Gaudí. Leave the square on its north-eastern side, follow Carrer de Casp for a few blocks, and stop opposite number 48.