Barcelona: history and heritage

About Barcelona: history and heritage

By the ULTIMATE Barcelona Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Barcelona has two languages, Catalan and Spanish, and a sense of itself as a Mediterranean city first. Its Gothic quarter sits on Roman foundations; its medieval trading empire reached Sardinia, Sicily, Naples and Athens; and its nineteenth-century revival gave the world the Eixample and the architecture of Gaudí.

At a glance

Population: 1,702,547 in the city of Barcelona (INE, 1 January 2024), with about 5.9 million in the province.

Names through history: Barcino (Roman), Barcelona.

A medieval trading empire that reached Sicily and Athens, and a revival that gave the world Gaudí.

Languages: Catalan and Spanish are both official; Catalan descends from the Latin spoken here under Rome.

UNESCO World Heritage: the works of Antoni Gaudí and the Palau de la Música Catalana and Hospital de Sant Pau by Lluís Domènech i Montaner.

Roman Barcino

Iberian peoples, the Laietani, lived on the plain before the Romans founded Barcino in the late first century BC. Its walls still enclose the core of the Barri Gòtic, and four columns of the Temple of Augustus stand in a courtyard on Carrer del Paradís. Beneath the Plaça del Rei, the City History Museum, MUHBA, lets you walk the Roman streets.

The counts of Barcelona

Visigoths and then the Moors held the city before the Franks took it in 801. The counts of Barcelona grew independent, and in 1137 a marriage joined the county to the Kingdom of Aragon. The Crown of Aragon built a Mediterranean empire, and Barcelona’s merchants traded from Valencia to Constantinople; its sea law, the Llibre del Consolat de Mar, was used across the Mediterranean. Santa Maria del Mar, built by the people of the waterfront in the fourteenth century, is the finest monument of that age.

Spain and the Catalan question

After the union of the crowns of Castile and Aragon in 1479, power moved to Castile. The War of the Spanish Succession ended with the siege of Barcelona in 1714, and 11 September, the day the city fell, is now Catalonia’s national day.

The Eixample

In 1854 the city walls came down, and the engineer Ildefons Cerdà planned the Eixample, a grid of octagonal blocks with chamfered corners. Industry, especially textiles, made Barcelona rich, and the 1888 Universal Exhibition left the Arc de Triomf and the Parc de la Ciutadella.

The Catalan revival

The Renaixença revived Catalan literature, and its architecture, Modernisme, turned the Eixample into an open-air gallery. Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló, La Pedrera and the Sagrada Família, begun in 1882, and Domènech i Montaner’s Palau de la Música Catalana stand within walking distance. Picasso spent his formative years here, and Miró was born here; both have museums in the city. The 1992 Olympics opened the city to the sea.

Our advice: walk from the Roman walls of the Barri Gòtic to Santa Maria del Mar, then up the Passeig de Gràcia to Casa Batlló and La Pedrera. Book the Sagrada Família for late afternoon, when the western light floods the nave.

Sources

Population: Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE), official population figures at 1 January 2024 (Royal Decree 1210/2024). History: Museu d’Història de Barcelona (MUHBA); Basílica de la Sagrada Família; UNESCO World Heritage Centre; Barcelona Turisme; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Barcelona”.

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