Barcelona Old Town, street by street

Distance

28.3 km

Time

about 8 hours

Streets

222

Steps

1 street with steps

Start point

Catedral de la Santa Creu i Santa Eulàlia

Short on time

Barcelona in one walk: 8 sights in a loop

Phone needed while walking

no

Works offline

yes

Expires

never

Landmarks

Sights in Barcelona: what I would eat first.

Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.

• Catedral de la Santa Creu i Santa Eulàlia 1,500 points

  In 1417 they closed the front with a plain wall, just for the moment. The moment lasted until the end of the 19th century, when an industrialist, Manuel Girona, offered to pay for a façade. Provisional, for nearly five centuries. Finally, someone at my pace. Inside, some of it is alive. I am not telling you what.

• Basílica de Santa Maria del Mar 500 points

  Foreigners counted three cathedrals in this city, and this church was one of them. The locals added nicknames: the Cathedral without a cloister, the Fishmongers' Seat, the Seat of the Sea. Keep your eyes on the door and on the glass. I am not telling you why.

• La Rambla 500 points

  The name comes from the Arabic ramla, sandy ground. I checked: it is paved now. An estimated 240,000 walkers go along it on an ordinary weekday. In the Pla de la Boqueria they cross Joan Miró's 1976 pavement, made to greet visitors arriving by sea. At the top end, stop. I am not telling you why.

• Palau de la Música Catalana 500 points

  Inside, the skylight stands for the sun and Wagner's Valkyries break out of the ceiling. A bust of Anselm Clavé faces one of Beethoven and neither has blinked yet. I respect that. Something happens here every 26 December, and it has passed its hundredth year. I am not telling you what.

• Museu Picasso 250 points

  It opened in 1963 under a name that was not his. A whole house of Picasso, with somebody else on the door. I am not telling you whose, or why. I eat the street outside, and the street has no opinion.

• Palau Centelles 250 points

  A count's will left everything to one great-nephew and the county to another. The fight over who owned this palace went to law and was settled in 1628. It houses Catalan public institutions now, and I only want the street in front of it. Nobody has sued. The family name has its own tale. I am not telling you how it goes.

• Palau Savassona 250 points

  A baron's house on Carrer de la Canuda. In 1796 the painter Francesc Pla, El Vigatà, covered its dining room with murals, among them the gods Mars and Venus. A whole room for eating and no street in it. I do not see the point. The house is private, so I make no offer about the door. What moved in later is the good part, and I am not telling you what.

• Plaça de Catalunya 250 points

  This was an open esplanade in front of one of the city's main gates, before cafés, theatres and fairground booths filled it. On the corner of Carrer de Pelai, the Cafè Zurich has been where this city meets and meets again since 1920. Everyone here is waiting for somebody. I am here for the paving. One thing in this square looks like a building mistake. It is not, and I am not telling you which.

• Plaça Reial 250 points

  In 1902 a Magic Fountain replaced the Three Graces: coloured water under 96 arcs of light, twenty-seven years before the one on Montjuïc. By 1925 it clearly did not work, and the Three Graces came back. Patience outlasts magic. I could have told them. Now look at what lights the place after dark. I am not telling you who got that job.

Eating

What to eat in Barcelona: actual food.

There is no one Barcelona dish to hunt for. What this city cooks is the Catalan home kitchen: the pot that fed the houses, vegetables cooked in the embers, a stew with mushrooms in it. Look for it at midday, on a market counter or in a dining room for people on their lunch break. You take the plates. I take the streets between them.

Checked 5 November 2026.

Why here

Somebody stood here and decided.

The Romans wanted a spot between Emporiae to the north and Tàrraco to the south, and they took the top of Mount Taber: a small hill facing the sea and looking over the plain, where Plaça de Sant Jaume is today. It rises on the coast between the mouths of the Besòs and the Llobregat, and both river valleys give an easy way inland. The land around it was extensive and fertile, and the Via Augusta and the trade routes tied it to the rest of the empire. A small hill with roads running off it. I call that a well-laid table.

Sources: barcelona.cat; www.enciclopedia.cat; barcelona.cat

Who ruled

Everyone who thought they owned this.

I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.

15 BC–475

Rome, from Augustus on: a planned grid with sewers, a temple, a forum and a city wall. Roman rule ended in 475, when the region passed to the Visigothic king Euric. Streets planned before anybody walked them. I approve.

Sources: barcelona.cat; www.enciclopedia.cat

878–1137

The counts of Barcelona. In 878, at the Council of Troyes, the Frankish king invested Guifré el Pelós, Wilfred the Hairy, with Barcelona, Girona and Besalú, and the line starts with him. In the 11th century Ramon Berenguer I proclaimed the Usatges de Barcelona, the first Catalan legislative text. In 1137 a pact between Ramon Berenguer IV and Ramiro the Monk turned the county house into the royal dynasty of Aragon. The Hairy. A stone takes centuries to manage even moss.

Sources: www.enciclopedia.cat; barcelona.cat; www.barcelona.cat p. 13

1249–1714

The Council of One Hundred, under the count-kings. In 1249 King James I agreed to the first municipal government, the Council of One Hundred followed in 1265, and in 1284 Peter the Great granted the regime in perpetuity. A decree, the Nova Planta, abolished it in 1714. The Council of One Hundred had 128 members. I count every dot I eat. I have questions.

Sources: www.barcelona.cat p. 17; barcelona.cat; www.enciclopedia.cat

1854–

The modern city, and a map decided from Madrid. The walls were pulled down in 1854. The council and the bourgeoisie wanted Rovira's plan, with streets running star-like towards a great square at today's Plaça de Catalunya, and people liked it more. In 1859 a royal order approved Cerdà's project instead, a right-angled grid, because the royal house in Madrid preferred it. Plaça de Catalunya is the seam: your level reaches it, and the grid starts behind it. Nobody asked me. I would have eaten either.

Sources: ca.wikipedia.org; www.enciclopedia.cat; de.wikipedia.org

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

1. Four Roman columns, 12 metres high, are hidden in the courtyard of a Gothic palace at Carrer del Paradís 10. They come from the temple the Romans built for Augustus at the top of Mount Taber. One of the four is a transfer: a mid-20th-century restoration brought in a column that had for some time stood in Plaça del Rei. Columns are off my menu. The street that hides them is not.

   Sources: barcelona.cat; barcelona.cat

2. The Roman wall is today the city's most extensive monument. It runs along Plaça Nova, Avinguda de la Catedral, Carrer de la Tapineria, Plaça de l'Àngel and Carrer del Sots-tinent Navarro, and at Plaça Nova the gate towers stand round, about 7 m across. Late in the 3rd century it was doubled, and it came to carry about eighty towers. It stands upright, so it does not count as a street. I have complained.

   Sources: barcelona.cat p. 1; www.enciclopedia.cat

3. Plaça de Sant Jaume sits on the Roman forum, with the Palau de la Generalitat on one side and the Casa de la Ciutat on the other. The city hall goes back to 1369, when its Saló de Cent was begun, and it has two faces: the main, Neoclassical one was built in 1847, and the Gothic one is still there on Carrer de la Ciutat. To enlarge it, the church of Sant Miquel behind it came down in 1868, at what is still Plaça de Sant Miquel. The doorway went to the basilica of la Mercè on Carrer Ample and the bell tower to the church of la Concepció on Carrer d'Aragó, both beyond this level's edge. The floor, a Roman bath mosaic of black fish and sea monsters, went to the Museu d'Arqueologia de Catalunya. Even I keep what I eat in one place.

   Sources: www.barcelona.cat; ca.wikipedia.org

Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.

• 222streets
• 1,502dots
• 22.8km of street
• 28.3km on foot
• 8hours at a stroll

3% of the streets here, by length, are cobbles or setts: number 58 of 59 Old Towns measured.