Girona's old town: from Eiffel's bridge to the Roman walls: a self-guided walk

By Alleytale

Roman, Jewish and Gothic Girona

Girona's old town climbs from the river to the walls the Romans began, and each stop adds a layer: a Jesuit church, a synagogue that was a centre of Kabbalah, a house by the architect Rafael Masó, a Romanesque chapel, monastery and baths, and a Gothic cathedral.

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The stops

1. 1Eiffel Bridge

   Gustave Eiffel's company of Paris won the public auction for this iron bridge on 6 January 1877, with a budget of 22,500 pesetas, and the load test took place that July. It is a single lattice span of 41.5 metres carrying a deck only 2.62 metres wide, with lamps donated by the builder. Asphalt laid on it in 1959 damaged the structure, so in 1979 the deck was changed to oak and the weakened structure reinforced.

   

2. 2Sant Martí Sacosta

   A church of Saint Martin is on record from the 9th century, with a land donation to it written down in 846, and the Jesuits settled here in December 1581 and founded a college. The present baroque church, built in the 16th and 17th centuries, rises on the main walls of the older three-aisled Romanesque one, with its facade at the top of the Sant Martí stairs and its bell tower still on an 11th-century base. The old college buildings now house the diocesan seminary and archive.

   

3. 3Museum of Jewish History

   The medieval synagogue on this site was a centre of early Kabbalism, a house of learning used by scholars such as Nachmanides, Isaac the Blind and Azriel of Girona. It was looted after the massacre of 1391, yet in 1415 Ferdinand I of Aragon ordered it restored to the Jews, and in July 1492, after the Alhambra Decree, it was sold to the canons of the cathedral for 300 pounds. Today it forms part of the Bonastruc ça Porta Centre and Museum, and on doorways in the Call you can still spot the notch where a mezuzah once hung.

   

4. 4Masó House

   The architect Rafael Masó i Valentí was born in this house in 1880. Between 1911 and 1919 he renovated it, merging four dwellings behind a single facade, and on the river side he painted it white with yellow glazed tiles, so it stands apart from the multicoloured row of Onyar houses, whose palette of 29 colours dates from 1982. Since 2006 it has been the seat of the Rafael Masó Foundation.

   

5. 5Basilica of St. Felix

   This basilica goes back to the early days of Christianity in Girona; built between the 12th and 17th centuries, it keeps much of its Romanesque construction, with a Gothic nave and a baroque facade. Inside are eight Roman and early Christian sarcophagi of the 3rd and 4th centuries and the Gothic tomb of Narcissus, whom tradition counts among Girona's early bishops. The most important remains of the Roman wall's polygonal masonry are found near the church.

   

6. 6Capella de Sant Nicolau

   This small Romanesque chapel, documented from 1135, was built in the cemetery of the Sant Pere monastery so that parish services could be held there. It began with a circular plan, and an octagonal dome rises over the crossing. After 1835 it passed to private owners and served as a leather merchant's warehouse and then a sawmill, until the town council bought it in 1936.

   

7. 7Sant Pere de Galligants

   This Benedictine monastery goes back to the 10th century and stood outside Girona's walls until 1362, when it was enclosed within them and redesigned in a more defensive shape. Its small Romanesque cloister has a north gallery from 1154 and the other sides from 1190, with capitals carved with lions, sirens and scenes from the life of Jesus. The buildings now house the Girona venue of the Archaeology Museum of Catalonia.

   

8. 8Arab Baths

   Despite the name, these are Romanesque public baths of the 12th century, rebuilt in the 13th and modelled on Roman thermae, Muslim baths and Jewish mikvehs; the first document naming them dates from 1194. They were demolished after the siege of 1285, Capuchin nuns bought them in 1618 for their convent, and restoration began in 1929 under the architects Rafael Masó, whose family house is also on this walk, and Emili Blanch. Look for the octagonal pavilion of eight slender columns.

   

9. 9Girona Cathedral

   A large staircase finished in 1607 climbs to the baroque facade, begun in 1606, whose upper part was only completed in 1961. Behind it stands the widest Gothic nave in the world, 22.98 metres across, from a design started in 1416. Of the older Romanesque church only the cloister and a bell tower remain.

   

10. 10Girona Art Museum

    Girona's art museum fills the Bishop's Palace beside the cathedral, a central courtyard ringed by Romanesque and Gothic buildings; it was created by an agreement of 7 December 1976 between the provincial council and the diocese. The palace's old prison, on the second floor, had a fireplace and a view over a courtyard, and held clerics punished by the bishop or the church courts, and some of the inscriptions the prisoners made can still be read on the whitewashed walls.

    

11. 11Torre Gironella

    This is the highest point of the Roman wall, where the clear remains of a square Roman tower can still be seen, and it was long believed to be the site of the city's first settlement. The tower is documented from 994, and around the year 1000 Count Ramon Borrell III built the castle of Gironella that took the Roman towers inside its walls. The tower fell on its own in 1404 and was rebuilt smaller from 1411, and Napoleonic troops blew the castle up in 1814.

    

12. 12Girona's city walls

    Girona's first wall dates from the 1st century BC, when the Romans founded Gerunda, and it was largely rebuilt in the 14th century under Peter the Ceremonious, with the Roman wall as its foundation. The western side was pulled down around 1900 to let the city grow, while the eastern side stayed standing, and between 1983 and 2003 its missing parts were rebuilt. The walkway along it, the Passeig de la Muralla, lets you walk the walls and climb the towers for views over the old town and the countryside.

    

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