Barcelona Past: The Carta Històrica

Barcelona wears its history on its sleeve, so to speak. Walk thirty minutes inland from the city center and you’ll pass through the perfectly preserved, thousand-year-old medieval Ciutat Vella, the sprawling, grandiose 19th century Eixample before reaching the quaint, small town charm of the outlying barris. While you can infer a lot about the city’s history from a saunter through its streets, for those of a more studious disposition—who prefer pouring over old maps to traipsing across town—Barcelona also has an extraordinary online tool that lets you explore its urban plan. 

It’s called the Carta Històrica de Barcelona, and through a stunningly detailed chronological series of interactive maps it uncovers a multitude of stories from Barcelona’s past, synthesizing history with cartography to represent Barcelona’s growth from a small Roman settlement to the behemoth we know today. Using 27 historically significant dates, each map guides you through the story of the city’s development, depicting how the city has blossomed over the past two millennia.

The tool was developed by the Museu d'Història de Barcelona (MUHBA), which manages a number of heritage sites across the city. “The [Carta] project started many years ago, but I’ve been here since the end of 2012,” says Ramon Pujades, a specialist in medieval and modern cartography. As a research technician at the MUHBA, Pujades is a key member of the Carta’s curatorial team. “I arrived in time to improve some aspects of the Carta’s representation and to write the small texts that accompany each moment in the chronological bar … However, the project originated from the research of Manuel Guardia and a group of architects and historians from the MUHBA.”

The first thing you’ll note when exploring the Carta is the impressive span of time it covers. It begins in 150 BCE, showing only the terrain of the Collserola basin, before mapping the first Roman settlement, called “Barcino,” in 10 BCE. “This is a more conceptual map,” Ramon says of the pre-13th century period of the Carta, “but it works. What we have drawn is the Roman city which has been documented by archaeology, but fortunately for us the Roman people always planned cities in a really systematic way.” The systematic approach to urban planning taken by the Romans is fortunate indeed for historical cartographers like Ramon, as it has allowed them, with some degree of confidence, to plot the original settlement. Archaeologists used remnants of the old Roman wall to pinpoint the exact location, using the Romans’ predictable system of roads—in which a logical intersection of two main roads known as the Cardo and Decumanus form a city’s central axis—to find “Barcino” was centered upon what is now Plaça Sant Jaume.

Constructing a conceptual map based on archaeology sounds challenging enough, but how the team created the later medieval period of the Carta with such precision is actually more impressive, especially given only crude illustrations of the city survive from this era. In completing it, the team was indebted to a local architect and urban planner from the 19th century: Miquel Garriga i Roca, a man without whom the tool never would exist. “Barcelona is a lucky city,” Ramon tells me, “because in the 1860s, Miquel Garriga i Roca drew a marvelous group of plans of the whole ancient city … He developed this incredibly precise map of Barcelona … a marvelous piece of information that permitted us a scientific base to work on going back in time.”

Garriga i Roca’s work, viewable on another online tool created by the MUHBA called the Darrera Mirada, is a hand-drawn, hand-measured map that represents Barcelona’s old town as it was in the early 19th century. It’s almost, Ramon explains to me, as precise as a modern GPS map of the city, only out by a few centimeters here and there which, on this scale, matters very little.

Using Garriga i Roca’s map as a base, Ramon and the team were able to work backwards in time, comparing it with the less precise maps and illustrations of the city from the medieval period and noting what had changed. “The changes were very small from the medieval period, so by using this base, and by contrasting it with the information that the medieval documents provide, we could determine which areas had not changed very much between the 14th or 15th century and this moment,” Ramon shows me. “You could check if the form of the street was more or less the same or not, and you could check if it had suffered any realignment, or if the façade was in the same position … It was then possible to draw the evolution of the plans of the city during the medieval period.”

This “working back” method is a remarkably simple solution to what should be an incredibly complex problem: creating a comprehensive, milenium-spanning map of a city when no contemporary resources exist. It is also more than can be said for the vast majority of other major European cities, in which evolving street patterns and the lack of precise historical cartography prevents such a tool from existing. The Carta is, therefore, a unique tool for a city with a unique urban plan. And by representing Barcelona’s turbulent history in a visual, tangible form, it gives us a truly fascinating insight into the long-running historical trends that have shaped the city.

Barcelona, like many other once powerful Mediterranean cities, was in its true pomp in the 14th century. Like the maritime republics of Venice, Genoa and Naples, medieval Barcelona was a hub for trade, exchanging spices, silks and other valuable goods with kingdoms from the Aegean to the Adriatic, and North Africa to the Levant. With the Mediterranean as Europe’s primary trading pathway around the year 1000, Barcelona was able to secure a political centrality more significant that other Spanish cities. The immigration that came along with trade helped drive economic dynamism even more, stimulating manufacturing production in the city and thus aiding in Barcelona’s ability to finance ambitious architectural projects, many of which survive to this day.

You can see this period of prosperity clearly represented in the Carta. Take a look at the maps from the year 1100 to 1400 and you’ll notice that settlements begin to grow outside the Roman walls, which were later developed in order to fortify the city. “The medieval walls were given a second fortification in the 16th century when they had to be adapted against the improvements of bombs and cannons,” Ramon explains. “So the exterior form changed, but the posterior part, the back of it, was the medieval one. And you can still see the towers today.”

Indeed, it is architecture like the walls from this medieval period that gives Barcelona its distinctive Gothic aesthetic, divergent from the Renaissance and Baroque architecture that dominate most major European cities. Ramon sums this up first in economic terms, “The city that was able to build Santa Maria del Mar was not economically the same city in the 16th century.” However, he also notes that putting it all down to the city’s wealth is a little facile, as wide historical trends and geopolitical tensions also dictated this preference for the Gothic (and many of these disputes are still apparent in Catalunya today.)

“In the 1450s the commercial activity of Barcelona suffered a very important crisis due to the fall of Constantinople in the hands of the Turks.” Ramon tells me, “It was in this moment that Barcelona lost the political centrality that it had kept until the 15th century, and at the same time the Spanish monarchy was getting bigger very fast.” The breakdown of traditional Mediterranean trade routes after the usurpation of the Byzantine empire by the Ottomans, combined with Catalan civil war and a European trend away from Mediterranean centrality stymied economic and therefore urban development in Barcelona from the 16th century onwards. Furthermore, the calamitous outcome for Catalunya following the Habsburg-Bourbon War of Spanish Succession in the 17th century (including “the disaster of 1714”) caused yet more stagnation in Barcelona, so the city was not able to afford the resplendent architecture of its more successful European neighbors.

But more than this, Ramon tells me that the conflict between a burgeoning Madrid and a declining Barcelona also meant that “once the city [Barcelona] started to recover its economic position, there was a voluntary rejection of the Renaissance, because the Renaissance means: the recovery of Roman law, and recovery of the central power of the monarch … So, for the local authorities, the Renaissance is a style that is unpleasant, they preferred to keep loyal to the traditional Gothic forms.”

This voluntary rejection of the Renaissance can be seen rather neatly in the Palau del Lloctinent, just behind the MUHBA in Plaça del Rei. “This was built as a residence for the lloctinent general, the territory governor [viceroy] of Catalunya. So they [Catalan architects] built an interior cluster which is absolutely Renaissance, because it was the modern style of the courtesans that follow the monarch, but the outside forms, the forms of the façades, they kept with the Catalan traditional Gothic”. (Cultural skirmishes between Barcelona and Madrid haven’t changed much in the past 500 years, it seems.)

Economic stagnation combined with Barcelona’s loss of political centrality might have caused a complete decline in the city’s prominence, however, the fact that Barcelona has managed to maintain a significant position in the Mediterranean realm since the medieval period, in spite of a poor economy, sets it apart from its European neighbors. “Barcelona is an exception in the Mediterranean world, because it is the only Mediterranean city that continues to be a significant capital nowadays, without being the capital of a state,” Ramon notes. “All of the Mediterranean commercial capitals of the medieval era—Venice, Genoa, Naples—are nothing nowadays, but Barcelona is an exception, because it became a large medieval capital in the middle ages and was able to keep this position until the start of the Industrial Revolution. So it is the only one which developed the commercial medieval revolution as well as the three successive industrial revolutions. And nowadays, Barcelona continues to be the most influential Mediterranean city.”

While Barcelona just about managed to maintain its position as a commercial power through those leaner years, its renewed position as a European city of note didn’t come about until after the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. This can be seen in one of the most striking periods of the Carta, which maps the vast expansion of the city following a hugely ambitious urban plan created by engineer, politician, and archetypal 19th century Renaissance man, Ildefons Cerdà in 1860. Prior to this date, the Spanish state had forbidden the city to build outside its walls, “In order,” Ramon explains, “to debilitate and avoid a strong Barcelona.”

As such, the smaller towns of Gràcia, Sant Martí and L'Hospitalet existed as independent municipalities not under the control of Barcelona, another move from the monarchy to prevent the city’s growth as a separate power. However, as Ramon explains, “By the end of the 19th century, the central government of Madrid had lots of economic problems due to the wars in Cuba and North Africa. Barcelona, with its money, paid what was necessary to obtain this enormous expansion.” And it was this that allowed for the growth of the city as we know it today.

Cerdà’s plan increased the size of Barcelona dramatically—the development of L’Eixample alone expanded the city’s size by 10 times—and it was developed with a seemingly limitless scope. “Cerdà’s idea was to avoid Barcelona having problems expanding any more,” Ramon tells me. “So he offered an unlimited area of expansion. Cerdà was a kind of visionary in his time—he conceptualized Barcelona as the new Paris.”

Based on this, Ramon claims that the 19th century is in fact far more significant than the 20th in terms of urban growth and the making of Barcelona as a modern city. Cerdà’s plans facilitated Barcelona’s expansion, equipping it with enough space to house the large numbers of immigrants arriving for work. While impressive new social housing projects and a renewed focus towards tourism following the 1992 Olympics appear on the map in the latter 20th century, (regeneration after the oppressive years of Franco) these modern advancements pale in comparison to the ambition and scope of Cerdà’s 19th century expansion.

The result, then, of the masterful work and superb precision of Ramon and the MUHBA curatorial team is a cartographic masterpiece that visually depicts Barcelona’s growth, illustrating large, complex historical processes with tangible resonance. It provides a jumping off point from which to delve into the dramatic, turbulent history of this bustling coastal city. There are surely few more impressive free public tools with such depth, breadth and academic rigor.

And for the future? Ramon says the team is in the process of generating a 3D map of areas in Barcelona using antique paintings and illustrations. The next step, then, is to show Barcelona’s growth not outwards, but upwards.

You can view the Carta Historica through the MUHBA website here.

The MUHBA manages over 10 heritage sites around the city, some of which are free to visit, for more information visit the MUHBA website.

Information beyond the interview was garnered from the MUHBA’s collection of publications which can be accessed here.

Harry Stott is a regular contributor to the Barcelona Metropolitan covering Brexit, local political and social issues as well as the music scene. He recently received a B.A. in music from the University of Leeds, and now writes and produces radio content for a number of organizations in Barcelona and beyond. You can read more of Harry's articles here.