Sant Pau del Camp: Saint Paul in the Fields
Why is it significant?
Walk up to the little church in its garden and look at the doorway. Rough stone, a plain round arch, and around it carved figures and faces so worn by nine centuries of weather that they seem to be melting. Everything around you is nineteenth-century or newer. This is something else entirely.
Key Facts
| Place | Sant Pau del Camp: Saint Paul in the Fields |
|---|---|
| Address | Carrer de Sant Pau 101, 08001 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.37620, 2.16970 |
| Part of Walk | La Rambla and El Raval: Barcelona's River of Sand, Opera Bombs and Gaudí's Last Days |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk up to the little church in its garden and look at the doorway. Rough stone, a plain round arch, and around it carved figures and faces so worn by nine centuries of weather that they seem to be melting. Everything around you is nineteenth-century or newer. This is something else entirely.
Sant Pau del Camp means Saint Paul in the Fields, because when the monastery was founded it stood in open countryside, well outside the city walls. The building you see is Romanesque, mostly from the twelfth century, which makes it one of the oldest churches in Barcelona. But the monastery is older still. In the church lies the tombstone of Count Guifré Borrell, son of Wilfred the Hairy, the semi-legendary founder of Catalonia, and he died in 911.
Being outside the walls had a price. Barcelona was sacked in 985 by the army of al-Mansur, the powerful ruler of Córdoba, and a monastery standing alone in the fields would have been among the first places to suffer. Over the following centuries the Benedictines rebuilt it in stone, low and sturdy, with walls more like a fortress than a palace.
If the gate is open, find the cloister. It is tiny, one of the smallest you will ever see, but its arches are unforgettable: each one is cut into three or five little lobes, a scalloped shape that recalls Islamic architecture, resting on pairs of slender columns with carved capitals of monsters, plants and people. In the middle of one of the most crowded neighbourhoods in Europe, it is almost completely silent.
The city slowly swallowed the fields, then the walls moved out, and by the nineteenth century the little monastery was surrounded by factories and tenements. That it survived at all is a kind of miracle. Now leave the garden and head east, back towards La Rambla and the sea, aiming for its last stretch, near the old convent of Santa Mònica.