Gothic Quarter History: From Barcino to Today

The Gothic Quarter is two thousand years of Barcelona stacked on one low hill. The Romans founded a town here, bishops and counts built a medieval capital on top of it, and the twentieth century restored, moved and added stones until the quarter looked the part. A Gothic Quarter private tour tells it in front of the walls; this is the story in order.

Barcino on Mons Taber, from the first century BC

Barcelona began as the Roman colony of Barcino, founded in the first century BC on a small hill the Romans called Mons Taber. The hill is barely noticeable today, but the lanes around the Cathedral still sit on it. The town's streets, its forum and its walls set the plan the Gothic Quarter follows.

The Barcelona History Museum has excavated a whole working neighbourhood beneath Plaça del Rei. There was a laundry and a dye house from the second century AD, a third-century factory that salted fish and made garum, and a winery from the second half of the same century. These were the town's industries, packed inside its walls.

The forum and the Temple of Augustus

At the top of Mons Taber stood the temple of the colony, dedicated to the worship of the emperor and dated to the first century BC. It rose on a podium reached by a stairway, at the axis of the forum. That arcaded square was ringed by the basilica and the curia, where the town council met, and it served as the market for goods shipped in from across the Mediterranean.

For centuries afterwards the temple disappeared into the medieval buildings that grew around it. Four columns survive, nearly nine metres high, and they now stand in a courtyard on Carrer del Paradís.

The medieval city of bishops and counts, 4th to 13th century

Christianity reached Barcelona early. Its bishops had a cathedral on the present site by the fourth century, a basilica with three naves whose remains were found under Carrer dels Comtes. The museum's excavations include the episcopal complex, with its hall, baptistery and residence, showing how this corner of the city changed from the fourth to the eighth century.

The Visigothic town of Barchinona followed in the seventh century. In 1046 Count Ramon Berenguer I and his wife Almodis began a Romanesque cathedral, consecrated in 1058. From the Royal Palace on Plaça del Rei, the medieval city grew into the capital of a Mediterranean empire and spread far past its Roman walls.

Building the Cathedral, 1298 to 1913

Work on the Gothic Cathedral began on 1 May 1298, under Bishop Bernat Pelegrí and King James II of Aragon, on the foundations of the two earlier churches. It took about 150 years. The apse and chapels came first, then the three naves, then the front, which was closed with a plain wall in 1417. The cloister was finished in 1448.

The ornate façade you see on Pla de la Seu came four centuries later. At the end of the nineteenth century the industrialist Manuel Girona paid for a façade and two side towers, drawn by the architect Josep O. Mestres from the fifteenth-century plans. His children finished the work in 1913 with the dome.

El Call and the Jewish quarter, to 1391

Inside the quarter lay El Call, the Jewish quarter of medieval Barcelona. The word meant a small street or alley. Its people were not cut off from the city: some held public posts, and they helped drive Barcelona's trade.

In 1391 the Jewish quarter was violently attacked. The assault ended its prosperity and scattered the community. MUHBA El Call, opened in 2015 in a medieval house on the old streets, tells its story.

The quarter in the Civil War, 1938

On 30 January 1938, during the Spanish Civil War, an air raid struck the church of Sant Felip Neri while children were sheltering inside. The shrapnel marks are still visible on the church façade, and the small square in front of it is one of the places guides stop to tell the story.

The twentieth-century Gothic remake

Much of what makes the quarter look Gothic was made or restored in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Cathedral's façade was finished in 1913. The Temple of Augustus columns were freed and restored in the early twentieth century by the architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner, and in the mid-century Adolf Florensa added a column that had stood in Plaça del Rei.

Whole buildings moved. Casa Padellàs, a sixteenth-century palace, was taken down on Carrer Mercaders and rebuilt on Plaça del Rei. And the carved bridge over Carrer del Bisbe, the quarter's most photographed sight, is a twentieth-century neo-Gothic addition, not a medieval one.

The dates in one place, with what is still there to see. To find each one in the lanes, use what to see in the Gothic Quarter, and for the numbers alone, Gothic Quarter facts.

History questions, answered