Barcelona

Gary McDonogh, Sergi Martinez-Rigol

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509511044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Barcelona has existed as a settlement for two millennia. Early civilizations shaped the city before it achieved, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, global power as a trading metropolis and empire capital. After a long struggle with the unifying Spanish state, the city revived, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as an industrial and commercial powerhouse. It became a center of culture, ornamented by modern planning and wondrous works by Gaudí and others. Barcelona became known as "The Rose of Fire": home to revolutionaries and anarchists. Creativity and conflict continued to shape Barcelona in the twentieth century, as its citizens faced the Spanish Republic, Civil War and Franco's dictatorship. Linking social and cultural currents to the rich architectural and experiential heritage of this multi-layered city, McDonogh and Martínez-Rigol reveal Barcelona's hidden history to modern-day visitors and residents alike.

1
The Evolution of a Mediterranean City (to 1000 CE)

Barcelona begins with the Mediterranean. Yet any historical understanding of this “Mediterranean” demands much more than the azure sea that laps the city’s recently reclaimed beaches, or the geology, climate, flora and fauna that have defined a broad, distinctive region. For Barcelona, the Mediterranean has been a profoundly human ecosystem of changing histories and cultures, redefined by movements and adaptations that have united and divided the peoples on the lands around this inner sea for millennia. Whether sharing the foundations of circum-Mediterranean cuisine – wheat, olives and vines that yield bread, oil and wine – or dealing with flows of knowledge, politics, trade and modernities, Barcelona has evolved through constant intersections of people, goods and ideas. Contemporary Barcelonins continue to reevaluate the meanings and issues of the Mediterranean today as well – from pressing environmental questions to artistic inspirations to crises of global migration. For this chapter, the Mediterranean also provides our place of orientation.

This chapter traces early human developments across the Iberian peninsula before incorporating others who crossed the sea, especially the dramatic expansion of Roman hegemony in the second and third centuries BCE. Only at the beginning of the Roman Empire do we find the first records of Barcino (Barcelona) as a Roman settlement, at the end of the first century BCE and the beginnings of the first century CE. Under Roman rule and through Roman culture, the city took on its initial form, a physical template shared with other Roman cities that continues to shape central Barcelona today.¹ Later, as the Mediterranean world faced centuries of war and change, the foundations and fortifications that Romans had built proved invaluable, allowing Barcino to become a regional capital for religion, politics and trade for Hispano-Romans and Visigoths. Indeed, this development even overcame the poor quality of the port: for a city so long defined by mercantile functions, Barcelona, ironically, has few “natural” attributes as a Mediterranean harbor.

Yet the physical formation of the early city is only part of the story. In centuries that followed its foundation, the city and its citizens negotiated their positions between the peoples and products of the hinterlands and the culture and connections of the vast plains of the sea. By the end of the first millennium CE, in fact, Barcelona and Barcelonins in the Marca Hispanica (Spanish March) balanced the influence of changing powers to the North, embodied by an expanding Frankish regime, and the power of the Muslims who had conquered the southern Mediterranean world in the eighth century CE. After a century of Muslim rule in the city, the Franks conquered Barcelona in 801. Although pillaged by Muslims as late as 985, Barcelona thereafter took shape as a feudal city on the edge of Christendom and Islam (with Jews holding on to their often uncomfortable position for centuries). As its leaders and citizens interacted across Mediterranean worlds, the city became a staging ground for an empire that would acquire Iberian territories and leap beyond them.

This critical early period of growth remains easily accessible to visitors and citizens within today’s Barri Gòtic, where the Roman roads met and remains of buildings and walls still stand.² Yet this cityscape can be deceptive: even the sea today lies farther away from the center and differs from earlier eras in access, constraints and use. The surrounding mountains have become urbanized and the roles of the rivers and streams, so important on the early plain, like its primal contours and vegetation, now seem difficult to imagine. Let us begin, then, with a reading of the Mediterranean itself.

Defining the Mediterranean

The constant presence of the Mediterranean as a brand in selling contemporary Barcelona sometimes makes it hard to look beyond beaches, sun and palm trees, and outdoor cafes. Geographically, the Mediterranean encompasses the sea, the contiguous territories of coasts and mountains, and a distinctive climate, forming a complex ecosystem that Barcelona shares with other parts of Spain, Europe and North Africa.³ The sea itself is a relatively small body of water, enclosed by land, whose scale permits safe navigation, even if sailors hugged its coasts for centuries; mountains and valleys both separate this world from, and connect it to, Europe, Africa and Asia.

Alongside physical geography, the cultural, political and economic meanings of the Mediterranean have constituted essential foundations of Barcelona’s identity. The great French historian Ferdinand Braudel, whose broad vision of the meanings of the Mediterranean underpins this work, reminded us of the constant interaction of Mediterranean imaginations. For “even today, when the Inland Sea is by modern standards little more than a river, easily bridged by airways, the human Mediterranean only exists in so far as human ingenuity, work and effort constantly re-create it. The different regions of the Mediterranean are connected not by water but by the peoples of the sea.”⁴

At the same time, the Mediterranean also constitutes a sensory, cultural and metaphorical universe: for the Catalan nationalist architect Nicolau Maria Rubió i Tudurí (1891–1981), for example, the dry and silvery Mediterranean garden offered a taste of Paradise, while to him Barcelona itself was completed by the sea.⁵

To grasp the complexity of this Mediterranean for Barcelona we must envision a landscape that has been reworked by humans over millennia. The first settlements in the area that would eventually become Barcelona took shape on a hilly, wooded coastal plain bounded by the sea, low mountains and two rivers – the Llobregat and the Besòs. While the climate has varied over time, including the Little Ice Age that began around 1300, winters tend to be mild and dry (general temperatures of 9–12 degrees Celsius, 49–54 °F), and summers, warm to hot but dry (generally in the 20s °C, or 68–88 °F). Thus, today, many residents of the city rely on cross-ventilation for much of the year, turning on heat for a few wintry months and often eschewing air-conditioning in favor of breezy terraces and balconies or a walk along wide boulevards; in this sense, Barcelona has long been “sustainable.”

The two mountains – Montjuïc to the south of the city, and Tibidabo, to the northwest, in the Serra de Collserola – rise 177.72 meters (583 feet) and 516.2 meters (1,693 feet), respectively. They are scarcely dramatic by comparison to the Pyrenees that stretch nearly 500 kilometers (310 miles) from the Bay of Biscay to the Mediterranean, rising to 3,400 meters (11,000 feet). While traversable through valleys and passes and historically central to Catalonia, the Pyrenees came to constitute a political boundary between Spain and France, ultimately dissecting the culture, although permitting the Catalan-speaking enclave of Andorra to survive as an independent micro-state. Other mountain ranges delimit Catalonia to the west.

Barcelona’s urbane mountains nonetheless gird and dominate the coastal plain (the placement of Montjuïc can be seen in figure 2.1). Montjuïc (a name possibly derived from “Mons Jovis” or “Jupiter’s mountain,” although others suggest a link with Judaism instead) provided a refuge from maritime dangers for early inhabitants, although its lack of water made continuing settlement precarious. It has played many subsequent roles within the larger metropolis. As a space apart, for example, Montjuïc has held the city’s cemeteries, from Jewish burial-grounds in Roman times to the major cemetery of late nineteenth-century Barcelona. As the modern city developed, it became a space of defense and domination, from whose fortified heights the city below might be protected – or bombarded. Montjuïc also became a place of escape from the industrial city, whose woods and parks still offer breathing space in a dense urban agglomeration. It was even a major source of stone for the construction of the city – hence, parts are honeycombed with excavations, some of which were occupied by squatters well into the twentieth century. Since the 1929 World’s Fair, Montjuïc has become more closely enmeshed with the city, connections reinforced by the 1992 Olympics and year-round cultural and commercial events. The Spanish government finally returned the sinister castle of Montjuïc to the city administration in 2007, which has reconfigured it as a museum and shrine.

The name of the other nearby mountain, Tibidabo, comes from the Latin “Tibi dabo” / “I will give you.” This refers to a Gospel passage in which the devil takes Jesus to a mountaintop to tempt him with all the riches of the world set before him.⁶ Less critical in the history of the city, Tibidabo was elegantly urbanized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Barcelonin elites seeking a healthy escape from the crowded city. Tibidabo’s green slopes are now crowned with an amusement park; the Fabra Observatory, founded in 1904; and the Temple Expiatori del Sagrat Cor, built between 1902 and 1960, begun by Enric Sagnier and finished by his son, echoing devotions to the Sacred Heart enshrined in Paris and Rome. This building was also constructed to atone for the sins of the Tragic Week (Setmana Tràgica) of 1909.

Both mountains shape connections to what lies beyond them. Montjuïc partially separates the city from the thriving industrial port area of the Zona Franca, the airport and the Llobregat delta. Meanwhile, one crosses the Serra de Collserola (by tunnel since 1991) to connect with the campus of the Universitat Autònoma (Autonomous University), and middle-class suburbs sprawling into the rich valleys of inland Catalonia. Over time, then, these mountains have channeled metropolitan growth but have scarcely confined it; their varied uses show how people themselves continuously adapt geographies to the city.

If these mountains have been domesticated, the original hill associated with Barcelona, Mount Taber, which defined the crossing of the city’s major Roman streets, has practically disappeared except for the slight slope of the streets between the Cathedral and the port. Such slight elevations, with their advantages for visibility and defense, would have been more useful to the pre-Roman Laietani who relied on farming and seafood for sustenance, although no actual evidence of settlement on this hill has been excavated.

Two rivers enclose this plain to the north and south of the sea coast. The River Llobregat, to the south of the city and Montjuïc, runs 175 kilometers (110 miles) from the Serra del Cadí to the Mediterranean.⁷ While not navigable because of its shallow, irregular flows, it has been a recurrent boundary. In Roman days, it was crossed by an important bridge on the Via Augusta whose medieval reconstruction still survives in Martorell, 21 kilometers (13 miles) west of Barcelona. Later, for centuries, it marked the boundary between Christian and Muslim domains. In modern times, the Llobregat provided hydraulic power important to early industries in Catalonia; by the twentieth century, industrial growth made the river one of the most polluted in Spain.

The Llobregat meets the Mediterranean in a fertile delta that has bee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgments
• Map of Barcelona
• Introduction
• 1 The Evolution of a Mediterranean City (to 1000 CE)
• 2 Barcelona the Capital (1000–1500)
• 3 Decline and Renewal (1500–1800)
• 4 The Industrial City (1800–1900)
• 5 The Exploding Metropolis (1900–1939)
• 6 Barcelona under Franco (1939–1970s)
• 7 Barcelona Today and Tomorrow (1970s– )
• Selected Sources
• Chronology
• Credits
• Index
• End User License Agreement