The Barri Gòtic is the densest historical layering in Barcelona. The medieval cathedral, the 14th-century royal palace, the surviving Catalan parliament, the Roman walls, the Roman temple columns, the underground forum, the medieval Jewish quarter, the 1938 Civil War bombing - all in a 600-metre square between La Rambla and Via Laietana. The name "Gothic Quarter" itself is only about 120 years old. The medieval coherence the streets project is partly real and partly a 1920s romantic restoration. The result is more atmospheric than honest, and more beautiful than the documentary truth. Walk it slowly enough and you can read the layers without needing the labels.
Roman Barcino
Barcelona was founded as the Roman colony Barcino about 15 BC, under Augustus, as a small but strategically-placed coastal settlement on the Via Augusta between Hispania Tarraconensis and Gaul. The colony was tiny - about 12 hectares, maybe 4,000 residents - planned as a textbook Roman castrum with a forum at the cardo-decumanus intersection (today's Plaça Sant Jaume), a Temple of Augustus on the highest point (the Mons Tabor, today's Carrer del Paradís), and a rectangular wall circuit with four gates. The 4th-century walls were a major upgrade against German incursions: 2 metres thick, 9 metres tall, 78 towers around the 1.4 km perimeter.
You can still see significant chunks of Roman Barcino. The four columns of the Temple of Augustus stand inside the courtyard of an ordinary residential building at Carrer del Paradís 10 - 9 metres tall, 1.4 metres in diameter, untouched since the 1st century BC. The two round Roman towers at Plaça Nova flanking the cathedral approach are part of the original 4th-century wall circuit. The Plaça Ramon Berenguer III stretch (along Via Laietana) has the best-preserved length of Roman wall in the city - with medieval houses built directly on top, you can read the layers from the road below. Underneath the Plaça del Rei, the MUHBA museum exposes 4,000 sq metres of intact Roman streets - garum (fish sauce) factories, wine presses, a laundry, a 4th-century basilica. Together they preserve more visible Roman Barcelona than almost any other modern Mediterranean city.
The medieval county and kingdom
After the Visigothic and Moorish periods (the Moors briefly held Barcelona 711-801), the Frankish Carolingians took the city back in 801 and made it the capital of the Spanish March - a frontier county between the Franks and Al-Andalus. The Counts of Barcelona slowly accreted power and territory through the 9th-12th centuries, becoming hereditary, then sovereign, then (through the 1137 marriage of Ramon Berenguer IV to Petronilla of Aragon) joint rulers of the Crown of Aragon. By the 13th-14th centuries Barcelona was the largest city in the western Mediterranean - the trading capital of an empire that controlled Sardinia, Sicily, southern Italy, Athens, parts of North Africa.
This was the golden age that built the Gothic Quarter you see now. The cathedral of Santa Creu i Santa Eulàlia was started 1298 and consecrated 1448 - 150 years of construction in pure Catalan Gothic. The Palau Reial Major (the royal palace, now Plaça del Rei) was rebuilt 13th-14th centuries as the official residence of the Counts of Barcelona / Kings of Aragon. The Saló del Tinell - the great hall of the palace, with its six 17-metre stone arches - was built 1359-1370 for King Pere III. The Generalitat (Catalan parliament) was founded 1359 and has met in the same building on Plaça Sant Jaume continuously since 1418 - the oldest medieval government building in Europe still functioning as a government. Santa Maria del Pi (1322-1453) and Santa Maria del Mar (1329-1383, just across in El Born) are the two other great Catalan Gothic churches of the era.
El Call and the 1391 pogrom
Medieval Barcelona had one of the largest Jewish communities in Catalonia - maybe 4,000 people at its 13th-century peak, living in a tightly-packed quarter ("El Call", from the Latin "callis", narrow lane) between Plaça Sant Jaume and the cathedral. The community was prosperous and protected: court physicians, financiers, scholars, the philosopher Hasdai Crescas. The Sinagoga Major on Carrer Marlet (3rd-13th century use) is one of the oldest surviving synagogue buildings in Europe.
The Black Death of 1348 set off a wave of anti-Jewish blame across Catalonia. In August 1391 a violent pogrom in Seville spread to Barcelona; the mob stormed El Call on 5 August, killed about 300 Jews, looted the quarter, and forced most survivors to convert to Christianity. The community never recovered. The remaining Jews were officially expelled from Spain in 1492 under Ferdinand and Isabella. The Sinagoga Major was converted to other uses for 600 years and only re-identified and restored as a synagogue in 1996. The narrow medieval Jewish street plan still exists - walk Carrer Sant Domènec del Call, Carrer Marlet, Carrer de la Volta del Remei, and you're in the medieval Jewish district.
Columbus reports to the Catholic Monarchs
In April 1493 Christopher Columbus returned to Spain from his first transatlantic voyage and was summoned to court by Ferdinand and Isabella, who were spending the spring in Barcelona. The reception took place, according to local tradition, in the Saló del Tinell of the Palau Reial Major - the great hall above Plaça del Rei. Columbus presented the king and queen with gold, parrots, indigenous people he had brought back, and his maps of what he believed to be the Indies. The historical record on whether the reception was actually in the Tinell hall is mixed - some sources say it was in a different room - but the tradition is strong and the Tinell is the building. Stand in Plaça del Rei and you stand 5 metres below the floor where the Spanish empire began.
The 1714 catastrophe
The War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) was, from the Catalan perspective, a disaster. Catalonia backed the Habsburg claimant against the Bourbon Philippe V. After a 14-month siege Barcelona fell to the Bourbon army on 11 September 1714. Philippe V abolished the Generalitat, banned the Catalan language in official use, demolished the entire neighbourhood of La Ribera to build a fortress (the Ciutadella), and imposed direct Castilian rule. 11 September - "La Diada" - is still Catalonia's national day, marking the 1714 defeat. Catalan recovered slowly through the 19th century (the Renaixença movement), and the Generalitat was re-established in 1932 under the Second Republic. Franco abolished it again in 1939; it was re-established for the third time after Franco's death in 1977 and continues today on Plaça Sant Jaume.
The 1908 invention of "the Gothic Quarter"
Through the 19th century the old town was densely populated, partly slum, with no particular name - just "the old part". By 1900 it was a candidate for demolition - the urban planner Ildefons Cerdà had drawn the Eixample grid in 1859 with the expectation that the medieval city would be progressively cleared.
Then in 1908 the architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner and others coined the term "Barri Gòtic" - "Gothic Quarter" - as part of a Catalan-nationalist romantic-restoration agenda. The idea was to use the medieval bones to project a noble Catalan past (Catalan Gothic as the architectural expression of Catalan national identity). Through the 1920s and 1930s the city architect Adolf Florensa led a programme of selective demolition and restoration: he demolished post-medieval buildings to "reveal" Gothic ones, moved medieval facades from demolition sites to vacant slots in the Gothic Quarter, added neogothic elements to dignify the streetscape (the Carrer del Bisbe bridge, 1928, by Joan Rubió i Bellver, is the most famous), and built the neogothic main facade of the cathedral (1887-1913, designed by Josep Oriol Mestres).
The result is the Barri Gòtic as it looks today - more architecturally coherent than it was medieval, more atmospheric than honest, beautiful in a way the medieval original wasn't quite. The medieval bones are real (the cathedral interior, Santa Maria del Pi, Plaça del Rei, the royal chapel, the Generalitat courtyards, the surviving Roman elements). The medieval-feeling continuity isn't always real. Once you know the difference, you can read it - the too-perfect facades, the too-clean stone, the slightly-too-elegant Gothic windows. The fake-medieval is itself a historical layer now, a century old.
The 1938 bombing
On 30 January 1938, during the Spanish Civil War, Italian fascist aircraft flying for Franco bombed central Barcelona. Two bombs landed on Plaça Sant Felip Neri - the tiny hidden square behind the cathedral - hitting the church of Sant Felip Neri and the children's school next door. 42 people died, mostly children sheltering in the church basement. The shrapnel marks are still on the church facade. A plaque on the wall remembers the dead. The square is the most affecting spot in the Gothic Quarter - quiet, often empty, the shrapnel marks raw on the baroque stone. Stand in front of the plaque for a minute. Barcelona has many beautiful monuments. This one is small, ugly, and important.
