Private tour of mysterious and forbidden Barcelona

Starting point and first context. The guide briefly explains what is about to be shown: not urban legends, but documented episodes of Barcelona’s history that the usual tourist narrative leaves out. The Raval that starts a few meters away was for centuries the space outside the medieval wall where the city placed what it did not want inside – convents, hospitals, brothels and, from the nineteenth century, the working population that came to work in the factories of the Eixample.

From Carrer de Sant Pau inwards: the guide walks through the streets of the southern sector of the Raval, historically known as the Chinatown, a term coined by journalist Francisco Madrid in 1925 in his chronicle Sangre en las Atarazanas to describe the area’s atmosphere of brothels, taverns and criminality. The guide explains the deliberate urbanistic function of the Raval as a space of social segregation, the attempts to “clean up” the neighborhood throughout the 20th century – including the demolition of part of the historic fabric to open up the Rambla del Raval in the 1990s – and what remained: the Hospital de la Santa Creu, founded in 1401 as a hospital for the poor and indigent, and the area around Carrer Nou de la Rambla, where Gaudí’s Palau Güell lived for decades with the most stigmatized neighborhood in the city.

The guide goes through Las Ramblas not as a postcard but as a historical scene: the dry bed of the medieval torrent on which the promenade was built, the public executions that were held in the space outside the wall before the boulevard existed, the role of the Liceu – inaugurated in 1847 – as a symbol of the Barcelona bourgeoisie and the target of the anarchist attack by Santiago Salvador on November 7, 1893, which caused twenty deaths in the stalls. Also the bombings of the Italian aviation in the service of Franco in March 1938, which killed 42 people in Las Ramblas in three consecutive days.

The Mercat de Sant Josep, known as La Boqueria, has occupied since 1840 the site of the convent of the Discalced Carmelites, disentailed and demolished during Mendizábal’s exclaustration in 1835. The guide explains the disentailment as a political process – not simply anticlerical, but also a transfer of properties from the Church to the liberal bourgeoisie – and its impact on the urban fabric of Barcelona: dozens of convents demolished to open streets, squares and markets in the heart of the city. The site where today we buy fruit and ham was for centuries the center of a closed religious community.

The Gothic quarter between Carrer dels Banys Nous and Plaça de Sant Felip Neri concentrates the most opaque history of the city. The guide locates the site of the tribunal of the Holy Office, which operated in Barcelona from 1487 until its final abolition in 1834 and prosecuted hundreds of people accused of heresy, covert Judaism, witchcraft and sodomy. The Plaça de Sant Felip Neri, with its shrapnel marks from the bombings of January 1938, is also the scene of one of the summary executions of the immediate post-war period: on January 30, 1939, two days after Franco’s troops entered Barcelona, a group of people were shot in this square.

The tour concludes at Plaza Catalunya, where the guide closes the tour with a summary of what has been seen and time for questions. The space that is now Barcelona’s busiest square was for centuries the outer limit of the walled city – a threshold between the controlled Barcelona and all that remained outside.