Fossar de les Moreres: The Graveyard of 1714
Why is it significant?
Step into the small sloping square beside the great church wall, paved in red brick, with a tall curved arch of red steel at the top and a flame burning in it. There are no statues, no names of battles... only a few lines of poetry on the stone.
Key Facts
| Place | Fossar de les Moreres: The Graveyard of 1714 |
|---|---|
| Address | Plaça del Fossar de les Moreres, 08003 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.38370, 2.18230 |
| Part of Walk | Young Picasso's Barcelona: Els Quatre Gats, La Llotja & the Merchant Streets of La Ribera |
| Generated | Generated |
Step into the small sloping square beside the great church wall, paved in red brick, with a tall curved arch of red steel at the top and a flame burning in it. There are no statues, no names of battles... only a few lines of poetry on the stone.
This was the parish graveyard of Santa Maria del Mar, and its name means the burial ground of the mulberry trees. On 11 September 1714, after a siege of more than a year, Barcelona fell to the army of Philip V, the first Bourbon king of Spain, at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. Many of the defenders who died in the last fighting were buried in this ground. Afterwards Catalonia lost its own institutions of government, and the victors built a fortress over part of La Ribera to keep the city under its guns.
In the nineteenth century the poet and playwright Frederic Soler, known as Pitarra, wrote the lines you see carved here. In English they say, roughly: in the Fossar de les Moreres no traitor is buried; even losing our flags, it will be the urn of honour. Behind the verse sits a legend: the story goes that the old gravedigger refused to bury his own son here, because the son had fought on the other side.
The square as you see it is recent. It was redesigned in 1989, and the red arch with its eternal flame was added in 2001. Every year on 11 September, the National Day of Catalonia, people bring flowers here and gather in the evening. It is a date that Catalans of every political colour mark in different ways, some with celebration, some with protest, some simply with memory.
And notice the paradox: Catalonia's national day remembers not a victory, but a defeat, and the memorial is a cemetery beside a church raised with the help of the port's porters. Now walk down towards the sea along Carrer de Santa Maria and Pla de Palau, to the big neoclassical building facing Passeig d'Isabel II.