Plaça de la Revolució and the Festa Major de Gràcia

Why is it significant?

Here is a long, narrow square, with benches, café tables and the tall houses of Gràcia lining both sides. Its full name is magnificent: Plaça de la Revolució de Setembre de 1868. Nobody ever uses it. Everyone just says la Revolució.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Here is a long, narrow square, with benches, café tables and the tall houses of Gràcia lining both sides. Its full name is magnificent: Plaça de la Revolució de Setembre de 1868. Nobody ever uses it. Everyone just says la Revolució.

The name honours the Glorious Revolution of September 1868, when generals and liberals rose against Queen Isabella II and sent her into exile in France. For a few heady years Spain experimented with universal male suffrage, an imported Italian king, and then a short-lived First Republic. In republican, working-class Gràcia those years were remembered with pride, and the town's street names still read a little like a political pamphlet.

Now imagine this part of town in the middle of August. For about a week around the fifteenth, Gràcia celebrates its Festa Major, and the neighbours of dozens of streets compete to decorate them. For months beforehand, residents gather in courtyards and workshops to build whole worlds out of recycled bottles, cardboard and plastic: underwater kingdoms, jungles, space stations, hanging from the balconies and stretching from wall to wall. Then the prizes are announced, and the streets fill with concerts, long dinners and dancing until dawn.

The festival goes back to the early nineteenth century, and street decorating has been part of it for well over a hundred years. Carrer de Verdi, which runs right beside this square, is one of the streets that regularly joins in. On any other evening it is simply the street of Gràcia's best-known cinema, where films play in their original language.

If you visit in August, give yourself an evening here and let the crowd carry you. If not, use your imagination... and then head north, uphill through the grid of small streets, to a quiet square where a bronze man sits on a bench, studying a city that was never built.