Private welcome tour of Barcelona with an official guide

The arch does not commemorate any military victory. It was built by Josep Vilaseca in 1888 as a gateway to the Barcelona Universal Exposition, the event that transformed the city’s coastline and put Barcelona on the international map. The guide explains the political context of the Bourbon Restoration, the rivalry between Barcelona and Madrid, and why an industrial city wanted to present itself to the world with a triumphal arch of exposed brick in the midst of the effervescence of Modernisme.

The park occupies the site of the military citadel that Philip V ordered built in 1716 after the defeat of Barcelona in the War of Succession. For 150 years it was the symbol of the Bourbon occupation: to build it, the entire neighborhood of La Ribera was demolished – about a thousand houses – and its residents were evicted by decree. The current park, designed by Josep Fontserè in 1872, is literally the restitution of that space to the city. The guide points out the monumental waterfall – in whose construction the young Antoni Gaudí collaborated as a student of architecture – and explains the relationship between the park, the Universal Exposition of 1988 and the Parliament of Catalonia, which today occupies the old greenhouse.

The neighborhood of merchants and artisans that during the Middle Ages concentrated the economic activity of the Crown of Aragon. The Mercat del Born – visible from the outside – is one of the best examples of 19th century iron architecture in Spain, and its subsoil holds the remains of the neighborhood razed to the ground in 1714. The guide walks through the streets of Carrer del Rec and around the Basilica of Santa Maria del Mar – built by the neighborhood’s own inhabitants between 1329 and 1383, without royal or episcopal commission – and explains why its construction was a political as well as an architectural act.

The core of Roman, medieval and Renaissance Barcelona. The guide locates the layout of the Roman cardus maximus and decumanus – still legible in today’s street map -, the 1st century Augustan wall that is partially preserved in the basement of the Museu d’Història de Barcelona, and the Pont del Bisbe, the neo-Gothic bridge that connects the Generalitat with the Palau del Lloctinent and that is less than 120 years old despite looking medieval. The Plaza de Sant Felip Neri, with its shrapnel marks from the bombing by Franco’s air force in January 1938, is one of the stops along the route.

Historically outside the medieval walls, the Raval was for centuries the space where everything that the city did not want inside was installed: convents, hospitals, slaughterhouses, factories and, from the nineteenth century, the working population that came to work in them. The guide explains the transformation of the neighborhood since the 1990s – the MACBA, the CCCB, the Rambla del Raval – and what remains of the historic Raval: the Hospital de la Santa Creu, founded in 1401 and today home to the Library of Catalonia, and the streets of the southern sector that official urban planning never finished intervening. The walking tour allows you to read the Raval for what it is: the neighborhood that best tells the contradictions of Barcelona.

At the end of the tour, sangria included for the group. The guide will also recommend you what to do with the time you have left in Barcelona according to what you have seen and what has interested you.