Carrer de Montcada & the Museu Picasso
Why is it significant?
You are standing in a stone corridor barely wider than a cart, lined with tall palaces whose great arched doorways open onto hidden courtyards. Peek through one of them: an open staircase climbs along the courtyard wall to the main floor, under a row of slender Gothic arches.
Key Facts
| Place | Carrer de Montcada & the Museu Picasso |
|---|---|
| Address | Carrer de Montcada 15-23, 08003 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.38520, 2.18080 |
| Part of Walk | Young Picasso's Barcelona: Els Quatre Gats, La Llotja & the Merchant Streets of La Ribera |
| Generated | Generated |
You are standing in a stone corridor barely wider than a cart, lined with tall palaces whose great arched doorways open onto hidden courtyards. Peek through one of them: an open staircase climbs along the courtyard wall to the main floor, under a row of slender Gothic arches. That staircase is the signature of the Barcelona merchant palace.
Carrer de Montcada was laid out in the twelfth century and takes its name from the powerful Montcada family. Over the next three hundred years, as Catalan ships traded across the Mediterranean, the richest merchants and nobles built their homes here, close to the sea and to the church of Santa Maria del Mar at the far end. Then fashion moved on, the aristocrats left, and the palaces became warehouses, workshops and crowded flats.
In 1963 one of them, the Palau Aguilar, opened as the Museu Picasso. The founding gift came from Jaume Sabartés, a friend from the Quatre Gats days who later became Picasso's secretary. It was a delicate moment: Picasso was an exiled communist and an outspoken enemy of the regime, so the museum was presented discreetly, under his friend's name rather than his own. Today it spreads through five medieval palaces in a row.
The real treasure arrived in 1970, when Picasso gave the museum the work his family had kept in Barcelona: hundreds of pieces, school notebooks, academic studies of plaster casts, portraits of his sister and his mother. Room by room, you watch a child turn into a virtuoso by fifteen... and then, bored with perfection, start breaking the rules. Two years earlier, after Sabartés died, Picasso had given his series of fifty-eight variations on Velázquez's Las Meninas, in memory of his friend.
Picasso himself never visited his museum. He died in France in 1973, two years before Franco, and never came back. From the top of Carrer de Montcada, turn left along Carrer de la Princesa and follow it to the edge of the park, where another Barcelona painter left him a very strange present.