Historia de Barcelona

Barcelona City Guide

Whether you come to Barcelona to spend a short holiday, business trip or are a local looking for more information this Barcelona Guide is for you. If you stay in oin of our apartments then you will find that they are conveniently located near most of the main attractions.

Below you will find a brief history of the city of Barcelona.

Roman Barcelona

The origins of the city of Barcelona, which have been defined thanks to archaeological remains and literary and cartographic sources, date from the 1st century A.D., when the Romans established a small colony around the Taber mount. In this way Barcino started, to form part of Eastern Hispania, the capital of which was Tarraco.

The Roman cities in Catalonia were small -with the exception of Tarraco- but they formed a compact and well-linked net which covered the whole country. Some were created on the site of the old Iberian villages, some, like Barcelona, moved the established indigenous settlements to more easy-defended plain regions, or to key positions on high points between two rivers.

Romanesque Barcelona

Between the fourth century and the thirteenth century the city nucleus founded by the Romans was consolidated, and a process of expansion began that later would give a definitive shape to the city. After many political upheavals and the retreat of Moorish Spain, Barcelona experienced feudalism and a growing maritime trade, which allowed it to strengthen its position as a political, religious and trade centre.

At the end of the thirteenth century a second city wall was built to give protection to the new ravals around the Basilica of Santa Maria del Mar, where the thriving viles noves of the Mercadal, the port and the Rec Comtal were to be found.

Gothic Barcelona

Barcelona emerged from the Middle Ages as a city that had reached the limits of its possible growth in area and in the long centuries of stagnation that followed there were some attempts to bring order to the city and its social fabric.

The walls of the 13th century sheltered the viles noves (new houses) built outside the area of the Roman city, and from the 14th century on Barcelona gained a third stretch of walls around the cultivated fields of the Raval area.

Neoclassical Barcelona

In Barcelona the eighteenth century opened and closed with the country at war: in 1714 defeat in the War of the Spanish Succession and in 1808 the struggle against Napoleon\\\'s army in the Peninsula War. The eighteenth century was the Age of Enlightenment and enlightened despotism; the century that the German philosopher Immanuel Kant summed up as \\\"dare to think for yourself\\\"; a time of many changes across Europe that came to a head with the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.

Modernist Barcelona

From the proclamation of the new Cadiz Constitution in 1812 till the Republic of 1873 Barcelona experienced the various social and political upheavals that were felt throughout Spain. There were riots, strikes, the burning of convents, bombardments of the city and other kinds of confrontation resulting from the great strains within the city.

The city itself passed from being made provincial capital in 1833 to being governed by Juntes Provisionals i Revolucionàries and Comitès de Salvació Pública (Revolutionary Councils) later in the 19th century.

Noucentista Barcelona

At the beginning of the twentieth century, while Cerdà’s planned extension of the city on a rigid grid system, l’Eixample, was being carried out in a rather imprecise way, Barcelona became a capital of the cultural avant-garde, a city where the new advances in science and technology made an impact on every aspect of the daily life of its people. A new generation of industrialists and politicians started out on ambitious industrial and development plans to turn Barcelona into a modern metropolis, which they called \\\"grosse\\\" Barcelona. But 40% of the city’s inhabitants were still illiterate in 1900 and 18% in 1920. There were fresh initiatives in schooling and professional training; new market necessities and the city’s housing problems were dealt with; the first city trains were built, the tramway was electrified, the streets were lit and lifts were installed in buildings; Barcelona was on its way to becoming a fast-moving vibrant city, a city characterised by the media and mass consumption.

The Barcelona of the Today

The Barcelona we see around us now, the Barcelona we enjoy today, is a new Barcelona, Mediterranean in keeping with its traditions, with its face to the sea and its arms open to other cultures and peoples, giving and receiving, happy to make and to share its riches.

At the same time the Barcelona of the 21st century, for all its transformations, has not severed its ties with a proud history in which so many generations of cultural diversities have built the firm foundations on which the innovations of modern times have constructed an utterly unique city with a personality that is all its own.

The Barcelona of the 21st century is a European capital of astonishing cultural energy and a passion for progress, a city whose day-to-day life brings together every imaginable facet of the most diverse activities: these are the potential that has fashioned the city\\\'s present and give it the impetus to move forward into the future.