Mercat de Santa Caterina: The Roof Made of Fruit
Why is it significant?
You will see the roof long before you understand the building: a huge wave of colour rolling over the old market walls, hexagonal tiles in greens, ochres, reds and purples, like a crate of fruit tipped out across the sky.
Key Facts
| Place | Mercat de Santa Caterina: The Roof Made of Fruit |
|---|---|
| Address | Avinguda de Francesc Cambó 16, 08003 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.38610, 2.17850 |
| Part of Walk | Young Picasso's Barcelona: Els Quatre Gats, La Llotja & the Merchant Streets of La Ribera |
| Generated | Generated |
You will see the roof long before you understand the building: a huge wave of colour rolling over the old market walls, hexagonal tiles in greens, ochres, reds and purples, like a crate of fruit tipped out across the sky. Underneath it, the sober stone arcades of the nineteenth century are still standing politely, as if nothing had happened.
For centuries a great Dominican convent dedicated to Saint Catherine stood on this spot, one of the finest Gothic churches in Barcelona. Then came the summer of 1835, when anticlerical riots swept the city and convent after convent was set on fire. Santa Caterina burned and was pulled down, and on the empty ground the city built a market, opened in 1848, among the first covered markets Barcelona ever had. It kept the name of the saint whose church had vanished.
By the end of the twentieth century the old hall was tired, and the job of reinventing it went to the architects Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue. They kept the old walls and floated over them a roof of timber arches and steel, then dressed it in ceramic, hundreds of thousands of pieces in dozens of colours, inspired by the produce on the stalls below. Seen from the flats around, it looks like a market seen through a kaleidoscope.
Miralles never saw it finished. He died in 2000, at only forty-five, and the market reopened in 2005, completed by Tagliabue, his partner in work and in life. And when the builders dug the foundations, the convent came back: its buried foundations were excavated, and part of the remains has been kept on view inside the market, so shoppers buying olives walk a few metres from the stones that burned in 1835.
Before you go, take a breath at the counters: salt cod, wild mushrooms in autumn, pyramids of oranges, the voices of stallholders who know three generations of the same customers. This is how La Ribera has always lived, buying and selling. Now cross Carrer de la Princesa and slip into the narrow stone canyon of Carrer de Montcada, the street of the merchant princes.