Arts Santa Mònica: The Rambla of Convents
Why is it significant?
Here La Rambla widens and slows down, with the sea air coming up from the port. Find the long building on the Raval side of the street, with its modern ramp climbing along an old stone wall.
Key Facts
| Place | Arts Santa Mònica: The Rambla of Convents |
|---|---|
| Address | La Rambla 7, 08002 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.37720, 2.17570 |
| Part of Walk | La Rambla and El Raval: Barcelona's River of Sand, Opera Bombs and Gaudí's Last Days |
| Generated | Generated |
Here La Rambla widens and slows down, with the sea air coming up from the port. Find the long building on the Raval side of the street, with its modern ramp climbing along an old stone wall. That ramp leads into Arts Santa Mònica, an arts centre, but the walls are the remains of a seventeenth-century convent.
You have been walking down a street of convents without knowing it. From the sixteenth century onwards, religious orders filled the land along La Rambla, just outside the old walls: Carmelites where the Boqueria now stands, Trinitarians where the Liceu was later built, Capuchins on the site of a square further up, Jesuits at Betlem. Then came 1835, and the riots in which convents were burned, and the confiscation of church property that followed. Most of the convents vanished, and their land became markets, theatres and squares.
The Augustinian convent of Santa Mònica was one of the survivors. It was built in the 1600s, served many purposes over the next centuries, and in 1988 reopened as a centre for contemporary art, with the new ramp grafted onto the old body. Remember the hospital and its theatre privilege? The Teatre Principal, on the site of the city's oldest theatre, stands a little further up this same stretch.
This last section is the Rambla de Santa Mònica, and it has always been the sailors' end of the street. Portrait painters and caricaturists set up their easels along it, and for generations this was where the city met the port: seamen on shore leave, ships' chandlers, music halls on the side streets, and the long nights that gave the lower Rambla its reputation.
Ahead you can see the column with Columbus on top, pointing out to sea. We will leave him for another walk. Instead, keep to this side of the street and walk on towards the long, low stone halls with their arched roofs beside the Avinguda de les Drassanes. That is where the ships were built.