The Eixample is the most influential 19th-century urban-planning project in Europe and the densest concentration of Catalan Modernisme buildings in the world. The neighbourhood is large, gridded, and at first glance monotonous - 200 identical chamfered-corner blocks, all the same scale, all the same height. The texture is in the details: the 1859 grid that imposed a modern plan over the medieval city, the 1898-1912 burst of architectural inventiveness that pinned Modernista facades onto the standard blocks, the Sagrada Família and the Hospital de Sant Pau anchoring the north end, the Passeig de Gràcia anchoring the centre. Walk it methodically - the grid pays you back.
The 1854 demolition and the 1859 plan
Through the 19th century medieval Barcelona was strangled by its 1716 Bourbon-imposed walls - the population was about 175,000 in the same footprint as 1700, with the highest death rate of any major European city (60% higher than London). The military finally permitted the demolition of the walls in 1854. Madrid then needed a master plan for the expansion north of the old town.
The Barcelona city council wanted a classical radial plan with monumental boulevards. The Spanish government in Madrid instead commissioned a plan from Ildefons Cerdà (1815-1876) - engineer, statistician, social reformer and Republican politician. Cerdà had spent five years studying every Barcelona dwelling in the old city: he had measured death rates by room, income by occupation, light and air per resident; he had documented in painful detail the disease, poverty, and overcrowding of the medieval city. His Eixample plan, approved 1859, was the result.
The Cerdà plan: a 200-block rectangular grid, 113 by 113 metre blocks, chamfered corners at every intersection (creating the small octagonal mini-plazas that give the Eixample its distinctive aerial pattern), 20-metre-wide streets, originally with green courtyards inside each block (housing on only 2-3 sides). The diagonal Avinguda Diagonal and the wider Gran Via cross the grid. The plan was imposed over the Barcelona council's strong objection. The council kept partial control of building regulation and progressively allowed the courtyards to be built over - by 1920 most blocks were fully enclosed, defeating part of Cerdà's vision. But the grid and the chamfered corners survived.
Modernisme arrives
From about 1888 (the year of the Barcelona Universal Exposition that put Catalonia on the architectural map) to about 1912 (the year Casa Milà was finished), Catalan Modernisme produced the most architecturally inventive movement in Barcelona's history. The movement was contemporary with French Art Nouveau, Belgian Maison du Peuple, Viennese Secession, and German Jugendstil but distinctly Catalan - more medieval-inspired, more crafts-driven, more nationalist. The Modernista architects worked in close collaboration with ceramicists, ironworkers, stained-glass makers, sculptors, mosaic artists. The Eixample, freshly built and bourgeois-prosperous, was the canvas.
Three architects dominated. Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926) - the most famous, the most idiosyncratic, the most religious. Lluís Domènech i Montaner (1850-1923) - the most-honoured in his lifetime, the more rational of the three, also the political leader of the movement (he was a Catalan-nationalist politician and a Modernista theorist). Josep Puig i Cadafalch (1867-1956) - the younger one, the more medieval-inspired, also a politician (later president of the Catalan Mancomunitat 1917-1924). All three competed on the Passeig de Gràcia "Block of Discord" within a single 6-year window - one of the great architectural face-offs in 20th-century Europe.
Gaudí's Eixample
Gaudí's domestic masterworks are all in the Eixample. Casa Calvet (1898-1900, Carrer de Casp 48 - Gaudí's earliest Eixample commission, the only one to receive a city architecture prize during his lifetime). Casa Batlló (1904-1906, Passeig de Gràcia 43 - the dragon-scale remodel for textile industrialist Josep Batlló). Casa Milà / La Pedrera (1906-1912, Passeig de Gràcia 92 - the rough-cut limestone apartment building for the businessman Pere Milà; nicknamed "the stone quarry" by contemporary critics who thought it was ugly). And the Sagrada Família (started 1882, Gaudí took over 1883 aged 31, ongoing) - Gaudí's only ecclesiastical work and the project he gave most of his life to.
The Sagrada Família story is the most famous. Gaudí inherited an existing neogothic design and progressively reworked it into his own organic-structural vocabulary. After 1914 he lived increasingly ascetically on the construction site, eventually moving into a workshop room. He was hit by a tram on the Gran Via on 7 June 1926; mistaken for a vagrant in his shabby clothes, he was taken to the Santa Creu hospital where he was identified late and died on 10 June. At his death only the apse, the crypt and the Nativity facade were complete. Work has continued since - slowly through the early-mid 20th century, with major acceleration from the 1990s when computer-aided design let architects interpret Gaudí's lost plaster models. The basilica was consecrated by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010. Current schedule: structure completed by 2026 (the centenary of Gaudí's death); decorative finishes by 2034.
Domènech i Montaner and the Hospital
Lluís Domènech i Montaner's masterwork in the Eixample is not on Passeig de Gràcia (he did contribute Casa Lleó Morera there in 1902-06) but the Hospital de Sant Pau, built 1902-1930 in the north-east corner of the Eixample, 10 minutes walk from Sagrada Família. 27 separate pavilions connected by underground tunnels, each pavilion small and patient-focused (small wards, generous sunlight, gardens between buildings, ceramic-detailed exteriors). Built as an alternative to the cramped 15th-century Hospital de la Santa Creu in the old town - the donor was a banker, Pau Gil, who left his fortune to build a new modern hospital. Active hospital until 2009; the heritage section opened as a public museum after restoration 2009-2014. UNESCO-listed. The Hospital and the Sagrada Família are deliberately on the same axis (Avinguda de Gaudí connects them) - 1 km of monumental promenade between two of the most ambitious buildings of the era.
Puig i Cadafalch and Catalan medievalism
Josep Puig i Cadafalch was the youngest and the most explicitly medievalist of the three. His Eixample buildings - Casa Amatller (1898-1900, Passeig de Gràcia 41), Casa Macaya (1898-1901, Passeig de Sant Joan 108), Palau Montaner (with Domènech, 1893) - draw heavily on Catalan-medieval and Dutch-stepped-gable references. Casa Amatller is the best primer: a Dutch-stepped gable, neogothic windows, ceramic-tile facade, the entry hall with a stairwell ceiling of carved chocolate-coloured wood (the Amatller family were chocolate manufacturers). Now operates as a museum and you can tour the original 1900 interiors - the best preserved Modernista domestic interior in Barcelona. €19. Daily 10:00-18:30.
The 20th century and the present
The Eixample's burst of Modernisme largely ended by 1914. The Civil War (1936-39) damaged some buildings - the Sant Pau hospital was used for casualties and the operating theatres were upgraded - but did not destroy the architectural fabric. Through the Franco years (1939-75) the Eixample was the bourgeois centre, with most of the original Modernista buildings preserved. The 1992 Olympics drove restoration; many of the great Modernista facades you see today were cleaned and restored 1985-1995.
The Eixample is now the most-populated district in Barcelona - around 270,000 residents in 7.5 sq km, the densest urban grid in Spain. The Cerdà block, with its courtyard ideally hollow, has mostly been built over but some restoration projects are opening interior gardens (the "Pati Manning" courtyard at Carrer Bruc 22, the courtyard at Casa Milà). The neighbourhood is one of the few in Europe that you can walk for hours and see nothing but architecture worth photographing - the original Cerdà vision was a uniform grid, but a century of Modernisme made it the opposite: 4,500 individual buildings, almost no two the same.
