The Gothic Quarter: from Roman Barcino to the Crown of Aragon: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
Roman Barcino to the Crown of Aragon
The Romans buried their dead outside the walls, and the walk goes the other way: from the tombs along the road, through the Jewish quarter and the Roman gate, past the cathedral and the forum, to the palace where the counts of Barcelona and the kings of Aragon lived.
The stops
Most people count this big square as the heart of Barcelona, the place where the old city and the 19th-century Eixample meet. It dates from after the medieval city walls came down in the 19th century: it was conceived in 1859 and first laid out in 1902. Look for the compass rose set into the paving, then walk into the old streets.
Photo: Sergi Larripa (User:SergiL) — CC BY-SA 3.0 Roman law banned burials inside the city, so Barcino's dead lay outside the walls, along the roads. This burial ground from the 1st to 3rd century AD sits below the level of the square and can be seen from the street. It is the best preserved in Barcelona, with 85 burials identified, and the six monolithic cupae here are the only ones in the city still in their original place.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 Records show a small Romanesque church of Our Lady of the Pine Tree outside the city walls in 987. The Gothic church here was most likely built between 1319 and 1391 and opened on 17 June 1453, with a single nave almost without ornament. Its rose window is a faithful copy made in 1940 of the one lost in the fire of 1936, and the octagonal bell tower rises 54 metres.
Photo: Bewahrerderwerte — CC BY-SA 4.0 This is believed to be the Sinagoga Major of the Jewish quarter, and the building may go back to the 3rd or 4th century, though no one can say for certain that it was first a synagogue. It was greatly expanded in the 13th century. King James I visited in 1263 at the end of the Barcelona Disputation, and Shlomo ben Aderet served as rabbi here for about 50 years in the late 13th century. After the massacre of the city's Jews in 1391 its use was forgotten, until research from 1987 brought it back and it reopened in 2002.
Photo: Ferbr1 — CC BY 3.0 On 30 January 1938, during the Spanish Civil War, a bomb hit the church here and killed 30 people, most of them children from the school, among them refugee children from Madrid. A second bomb fell on the square and killed 12 more, making 42 dead in the second worst bombing of Barcelona in the war. The pockmarks on the church walls are the evidence, and the octagonal fountain in the middle was set there as a symbol of life.
Photo: José Luis Filpo Cabana — CC BY 3.0 Barcino was probably founded between 15 and 10 BC, and its walls went up between the 1st century BC and the 4th century AD. Here at Plaça Nova stood the Praetoria gate, and two of its towers, part of the wall and an arcade of the aqueduct that carried water to the city still stand. The 4th-century rebuild gave the wall 81 towers, each about 18 metres high.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 The Gothic cathedral was begun on 1 May 1298 on the foundations of earlier churches and took about 150 years, with the cloister finished in 1448. The pointed neo-Gothic façade is much younger, completed in 1913 from a design of the 15th century. In the cloister live 13 white geese, one for each year of Saint Eulalia's life, because by tradition she was 13 when she was martyred.
Photo: Jordiferrer — CC BY-SA 3.0 Four columns with striated shafts and Corinthian capitals are what is left of the Roman temple that stood at the centre of Barcino's forum, on the small hill called Mons Taber. Three columns turned up in the late 19th century on the building site of the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya, and a fourth, which had stood in Plaça del Rei, was added later. The dedication to Augustus is traditional, but unproven.
Photo: Canaan — CC BY-SA 4.0 You are at the centre of Roman Barcino: this is where its two main streets crossed, the cardo and the decumanus, and where the forum lay. Today the square is the administrative heart of Barcelona and Catalonia, with the Palace of the Generalitat facing City Hall. The palace is one of the few medieval buildings in Europe that still houses the institution that built it, and its oldest part dates from 1403.
Photo: Herodotptlomeu — CC BY-SA 4.0 Work on the Gothic church began on 1 February 1342 and lasted until 1574, on the site of an older Romanesque church and a chapel of Sant Celoni. The façade and belfry took until the 16th century, but the façade you see was rebuilt in Gothic Revival style between 1880 and 1887. In 1948 Pope Pius XII gave the church the rank of minor basilica, the sixth in Barcelona to hold it.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 This was the main residence of the counts of Barcelona and later the kings of Aragon until the mid 15th century. King Peter IV built the great hall, the Saló del Tinell, in 1359 to 1362, and its Gothic round arches stand on vaults from the 11th century. Beside it is the palace chapel of Saint Agatha, from 1302, whose sacristy is built into the old Roman walls.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 Around the middle of the 12th century this small chapel went up thanks to a bequest from a Barcelona burgher, Bernat Marcús. It began as a cemetery church, since he had given land for a cemetery for the poor, and he soon founded a hospital beside it. It is dedicated to the Mare de Déu de la Guia, Our Lady of the Guide, on what was the main road into the city. It still keeps its Romanesque structure and a bell gable with two openings, and in the 18th century it became the seat of the guild of mounted couriers.
Photo: Enric — CC BY-SA 4.0 The museum fills five adjoining palaces on Carrer de Montcada, medieval houses from the 13th and 14th centuries in the Catalan Gothic civil style, each built around a courtyard with an outside staircase. The first it occupied, Palau Aguilar, belonged to various nobles of the Court of Aragon before the Corominas-Desplà family bought it in 1386 and sold it 14 years later to Berenguer Aguilar. A restoration in 1960 uncovered a 13th-century fresco of the conquest of Majorca in 1229, now shown in the National Art Museum of Catalonia.
Photo: Francesco Bini — CC BY-SA 4.0 Built between 1329 and 1383, at the height of Catalonia's sea trade, this is an outstanding example of Catalan Gothic, with a purity and unity of style that is very unusual in large medieval buildings. The common people backed it rather than the nobility, and all the guilds of the Ribera quarter took part, with the foundation stone laid by King Alfonso IV of Aragon. Inside, the columns are spaced wider than in any other Gothic church in Europe, about 43 feet apart.
Photo: Kent Wang — CC BY-SA 4.0
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