Carrer de Pere IV: The Catalan Manchester
Why is it significant?
At the crossing of the Rambla and Carrer de Pere IV, turn slowly around and look above the rooftops. Sooner or later you will spot one: a tall, slender brick chimney, standing alone, sometimes in the middle of a square or a modern courtyard, with no factory left around it.
Key Facts
| Place | Carrer de Pere IV: The Catalan Manchester |
|---|---|
| Address | Rambla del Poblenou at Carrer de Pere IV, 08018 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.40350, 2.19850 |
| Part of Walk | From the 1888 Expo to the Catalan Manchester: Ciutadella Park & Poblenou, Barcelona |
| Generated | Generated |
At the crossing of the Rambla and Carrer de Pere IV, turn slowly around and look above the rooftops. Sooner or later you will spot one: a tall, slender brick chimney, standing alone, sometimes in the middle of a square or a modern courtyard, with no factory left around it.
Those chimneys are the gravestones of the Catalan Manchester. In the eighteenth century the meadows here were used to bleach and dry printed cotton cloth, the famous indianes. Then, in the nineteenth century, came steam, and Poblenou filled with textile mills, dye works, foundries, distilleries and flour mills. At its height this was one of the densest concentrations of industry in Spain, and people compared it to the English cotton capital.
It was also a hard place to live. Families worked long shifts in noisy, dangerous mills, children too, and lived in crowded housing between the factory walls. Out of that life came the cooperatives and associations you heard about on the Rambla, and also bitter strikes and labour conflicts. Carrer de Pere IV, the long diagonal street in front of you, was one of the arteries of this industrial world, lined with factory gates.
And then, in the second half of the twentieth century, the factories closed or moved out to the suburbs. Poblenou emptied. The great sheds were left to warehouses, to rust, and in the 1990s to artists who found cheap lofts with skylights and enormous rooms. Some of the old complexes survive, like Can Ricart, a little further up this street, whose fate became a famous heritage battle in the 2000s.
Today many of the chimneys are protected, kept standing as monuments even where the factory around them has gone. A tower that once poured out smoke now just points at the sky, like an exclamation mark. Now head west through the grid of streets, towards the high-rise skyline, to Carrer de Roc Boronat.