Barcelona: the back story

About Barcelona: the back story

By the ULTIMATE Barcelona Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Barcelona has reinvented itself again and again. Roman Barcino became the capital of a Mediterranean trading power, then an industrial city that tore down its walls and built the Eixample, then the host of two world fairs and the 1992 Olympics, which turned it back towards the sea. Each age left a layer you can still walk through.

Barcino

Barcelona began as Barcino, a small walled Roman colony founded in the reign of Augustus on a low hill near the sea. Four tall columns of its Temple of Augustus still stand, unexpectedly, in a courtyard on Carrer del Paradís, and beneath the Plaça del Rei the city history museum, MUHBA, lets you walk the excavated streets, a laundry and a wine-making workshop of the Roman town.

A Mediterranean power

In the Middle Ages the Counts of Barcelona ruled a growing state, joined with the Kingdom of Aragon in 1137. The Crown of Aragon traded across the Mediterranean, and the Gothic Quarter is its legacy: the cathedral, the royal palace around the Plaça del Rei, the vast medieval shipyards of the Drassanes (now the Maritime Museum) and Santa Maria del Mar, the church of the sailors and merchants of the Ribera, built in a single campaign between 1329 and 1383.

Barcelona keeps reinventing itself, and every age has left a layer you can walk through.

Out of the walls

By the nineteenth century Barcelona was an industrial city of textile mills, packed inside its old walls. The walls came down from 1854, and in 1860 building began on the engineer Ildefons Cerdà’s plan for the Eixample, the “extension”: a great grid of square blocks with cut-off corners, designed for light, air and traffic. Cerdà also gave the world a word: his Teoría general de la urbanización of 1867 is credited with coining “urbanisation”.

Two world fairs

The Universal Exhibition of 1888 transformed the old citadel into the Parc de la Ciutadella and gave the city the brick Arc de Triomf as its gateway. The International Exhibition of 1929 did the same for Montjuïc: the Palau Nacional (now the MNAC), the Magic Fountain and Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion, a landmark of modern architecture, rebuilt on its original site in 1986.

Modernisme

Between the two fairs the new bourgeoisie of the Eixample commissioned the extraordinary houses of Modernisme, Catalonia’s Art Nouveau, from Antoni Gaudí, Lluís Domènech i Montaner and Josep Puig i Cadafalch (our separate back story tells their story). Gaudí died in June 1926, three days after being struck by a tram. A hundred years later, in February 2026, the cross was set on the Tower of Jesus Christ, bringing the Sagrada Família to its full height of 172.5 metres; work on the interior continues.

1992

The Olympic Games of 1992 were Barcelona’s next great reinvention. Railway lines and old industry along the shore gave way to the Vila Olímpica, the Port Olímpic, a seafront promenade and a string of city beaches, and new ring roads, while Montjuïc gained the Palau Sant Jordi arena and a renovated Olympic Stadium. A city that had long turned its back on the sea opened up to it.

Barcelona today

Today Barcelona is a capital of design, technology and food. The former factory district of Poblenou has become the 22@ innovation district, every year the Mobile World Congress fills the Fira Gran Via, and in 2024 the city hosted the America’s Cup. FC Barcelona returned to a rebuilt Camp Nou in November 2025, with the upper tiers and roof still being completed in stages.

Legends

Barcelona has two favourite founding myths: that Hercules founded it, or that it was named after the Carthaginian Barca family. Neither is history, but both are proudly told. Every 23 April the city celebrates its patron, Sant Jordi, who by legend slew a dragon; the dragon appears on façades all over town, most famously in the scaly roof of Gaudí’s Casa Batlló.

Our advice: read Barcelona in layers. Start under the Plaça del Rei with the Romans, walk to Santa Maria del Mar for the Gothic city, take the metro to Passeig de Gràcia for Modernisme and finish on the beach at Barceloneta, the gift of 1992.

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