Carrer de la Marina: Cerdà's Grid and the First Glimpse
Why is it significant?
Pause in the middle of the crossroads and notice its shape. The four corners are not sharp: each building is sliced off at an angle, so the junction opens into a small octagonal square. Up the street, the spires of the Sagrada Família fill the far end of the view.
Key Facts
| Place | Carrer de la Marina: Cerdà's Grid and the First Glimpse |
|---|---|
| Address | Carrer de la Marina / Carrer d'Aragó, 08013 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.40170, 2.17780 |
| Part of Walk | Gaudí's Endless Temple to Domènech's Garden Hospital: Sagrada Família & Sant Pau, Barcelona |
| Generated | Generated |
Pause in the middle of the crossroads and notice its shape. The four corners are not sharp: each building is sliced off at an angle, so the junction opens into a small octagonal square. Up the street, the spires of the Sagrada Família fill the far end of the view.
Those cut corners are the signature of the Eixample, the Extension, the grid that covers this part of Barcelona. Its author was Ildefons Cerdà, an engineer who studied the city's death rates and its cramped, airless old streets before he drew a single line. His plan was approved in 1860: streets twenty metres wide, square blocks of about 113 metres a side, and those chamfered corners, so that carts, and later trams, could turn and so that everyone could see what was coming.
Cerdà had a dream that the city did not keep. He wanted blocks built on only two or three sides, with gardens in the middle, open to the sun. Developers had other ideas, and over the decades almost every block was closed and filled in. Only recently has Barcelona begun to reopen some of those courtyards as small public gardens.
When the first stone of the Sagrada Família was laid in 1882, this part of the grid existed mostly on paper. The site belonged to the village of Sant Martí de Provençals, among fields and scattered houses, and was only absorbed into Barcelona in 1897. The founders chose it because the land was cheap. The church came first, and the neighbourhood grew up around it, block by block, so that today it is impossible to imagine the place without the towers.
And notice how the streets work as frames. Cerdà's straight lines were never designed with the basilica in mind, and yet they give you these perfect long views, the towers appearing at the end of a corridor of balconies. Keep walking up Carrer de la Marina for two more blocks, and stop on Carrer de Mallorca, in front of the side of the church that is still missing.