Barcelona: Gaudí, Gothic Quarter & La Rambla

The stained glass is extraordinary. Gaudí specified warm amber and red on the western facade to catch the afternoon sun, and cool blue and green on the eastern side for the morning light. Walk through the nave and the air itself seems coloured. The windows do not show biblical scenes in the traditional way — they are fields of pure colour that pool on the stone floor and shift as the sun moves.

The numbers are staggering. Eighteen towers are planned in total: twelve for the Apostles, four for the Evangelists, one for the Virgin Mary, and the central spire for Christ, which at one hundred and seventy-two metres will be exactly one metre shorter than Montjuïc hill — because Gaudí believed no human creation should exceed the work of God. Six are complete. The rest are rising. The expected completion date is around 2026, the centenary of Gaudí's death, which has a pleasing symmetry that the city is working hard to achieve.

Here is the most remarkable thing: not a single euro of public money has funded this building. The Sagrada Família is paid for entirely by ticket sales and donations, which means you, standing here, are contributing to the continuation of a project that began in 1883 and will finish within your lifetime. You are part of a 140-year act of collective devotion. UNESCO designated the church a World Heritage Site in 1984 — unusually, while the building was still under construction.

Buy a ticket if you have not already. Go inside. Go up one of the towers if you can. And know that Gaudí himself is buried in the crypt below your feet, in the chapel of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, where he spent his final years sleeping and working, having moved into the site because he wanted to be closer to his life's work.

Gaudí was meditating on a Catalan legend: Saint George, patron saint of Catalonia, slaying a dragon to save a princess. The building is the story made stone. The roof is the dragon's back, its ceramic scales shimmering in blue-green. The central tower is the knight's lance piercing the dragon's spine. The balconies on the lower floors are the bones and skulls of the dragon's victims. The facade itself is the dragon's skin. Once you see it this way you cannot unsee it.

Inside — if you visit, and you should — the staircase is a nautilus shell, spiralling upward in glazed blue tile that gets paler as you rise, as if you are ascending through increasingly clear water toward the surface of the sea. The central light well is the same: a gradation of blue from deep indigo at the bottom to near-white at the top, so that every floor receives the same quality of light. It is a structural and aesthetic solution achieved simultaneously, which is the essence of what Gaudí did.

This block of the Passeig de Gràcia is nicknamed the Manzana de la Discordia — the Block of Discord — because three of Barcelona's greatest Modernisme architects each built here within a decade of each other: Gaudí with Casa Batlló, Lluís Domènech i Montaner with Casa Lleó Morera, and Josep Puig i Cadafalch with Casa Amatller, which sits directly next door. Stand back and look at all three. They are in direct conversation with each other, arguing across a shared pavement about what Catalan architecture could be at the turn of the twentieth century.

Go up to the rooftop. This is where the building reveals its full strangeness. The chimneys and ventilation towers are warrior helmets, twisted knights standing guard over the terrace. Some look like abstract sculpture; others look like something prehistoric; all of them together look like a dream of a medieval army transposed to the top of an apartment building. They have been nicknamed by Barcelonans: the warriors, the helmets, the corn cobs. Gaudí called them nothing. He simply designed what made structural and aesthetic sense.

The building was UNESCO-listed in 1984, the same year as Casa Batlló and Güell Park, placing three of Gaudí's works on the World Heritage register in a single year. The Milà family, for all their patronage, never fully appreciated what they had commissioned. They disputed Gaudí's fee and refused to pay his full invoice. Gaudí donated his share of the payment to the Carmelite nuns in Gràcia. During the Spanish Civil War, the building was seized by the anarchist CNT-FAI union and used as a school and then a detention centre for political prisoners. History has not been kind to the building's owners, but the building itself endures.

This was Gaudí's last private commission. After completing Casa Milà he devoted himself entirely to the Sagrada Família, the project he believed was his true purpose. He lived simply, ate sparingly, and worked without rest. When he died fourteen years later, hit by that tram on the Gran Via, he left La Pedrera behind as the final statement of what he could do when he was still building for clients rather than for God.

The big buildings on the perimeter tell you where you are in the commercial life of the city. El Corte Inglés dominates the northeast corner — the Spanish department store chain that has been a fixture of middle-class Barcelona for decades. FNAC occupies a grand building on the east side. The Banco Español de Crédito building on the south edge is one of the finest early-twentieth-century banking palaces in the city. Around the square's inner ring, the fountains and sculptures are largely forgotten by the Barcelonans hurrying past, but worth a pause: the equestrian statue of a soldier, the allegorical figures representing the rivers of Catalonia.

In the autumn of 2017, this square was where much of the drama of the Catalan independence crisis played out. After the Spanish government declared the independence referendum of 1 October illegal and police were sent to prevent voting, hundreds of thousands of people gathered here and in the streets leading off it. The square has always been political — during the Franco dictatorship, speaking Catalan in public was dangerous, and the square was a flashpoint. The tension between Catalan identity and Spanish authority is not an abstraction here. It is written into the pavement.

The Rambla begins here, heading south toward the sea. That is your next direction.

The flower sellers are still here, their stalls a burst of colour that has been a constant feature since the nineteenth century. So, intermittently, are the human statues — performers painted silver or gold who stand motionless until you put a coin in their cup. The city government has spent years trying to regulate them, restrict them to designated areas, or remove them entirely, without notable success. The bird market that once operated in the lower section is gone, replaced by souvenir shops. The newspaper kiosks that sold every publication in Europe are still here, though they now sell mostly lottery tickets and tourist maps.

Halfway down, look for the large circular mosaic set into the pavement. This is Joan Miró's work, installed in 1976, one year after Franco's death, as the artist's gift to the city at the moment it was finally free. Miró deliberately refused to have it protected or roped off. He wanted people to walk on it. He wanted it to be part of the city's daily life, worn by seventy million feet rather than preserved behind glass.

One more thing: your pocket. Watch it constantly. La Rambla has been the pickpocketing capital of Barcelona for as long as there have been tourists, and the professionals who work it are extraordinarily good. Keep your phone in a front pocket, your wallet in a bag, and your attention on the faces around you as much as on the scenery.

La Boqueria has been on this site in some form since 1217, when farmers and goat herders set up outside the city's western gate. The word Boqueria probably comes from the Catalan boc, meaning male goat. The current iron and glass market hall was built in 1840 on the site of a demolished convent, the Convent de Sant Josep, destroyed during the wave of anti-clerical violence that periodically swept nineteenth-century Spain. The Modernista stained-glass arch you walked under at the entrance was added in 1914.

The mushroom stall in the interior — Petràs, run by the same family for generations — is a Barcelona institution. The fish section, toward the back left, displays the day's catch from the Mediterranean: red mullet, sea bass, razor clams, enormous langoustines with their shells still bright. The jamón vendors slice Ibérico ham to order, the fat white and trembling. The charcuterie stalls sell sausages you have never heard of. This is the food culture of a city that takes its eating seriously.

The debate about whether La Boqueria is dying under tourist pressure is ongoing and genuine. Rents have risen as the market's fame has attracted commercial operators rather than traditional food vendors. The city has implemented visitor limits and tried to preserve the market's character through regulation. Whether it succeeds is an open question. But the deeper you go, the more of the original market you find, and that market is extraordinary.

Walk to Plaça de Sant Jaume, the central square of the Gothic Quarter, and you are looking at two of the most politically charged facades in Catalonia facing each other across a cobbled square. On one side: the Ajuntament, the Barcelona city hall, in operation since the fourteenth century. On the other side: the Palau de la Generalitat, the seat of the Catalan regional government, where the President of Catalonia works. These two institutions have been in tension with each other, and with Madrid, for centuries. In 2017, the Catalan flag hung from every window of the Generalitat while Spanish police stood in the streets below. You are standing in the middle of an ongoing political argument that is nine hundred years old.

The lanes around you were laid out in the medieval period and have barely changed since. Residents hung laundry across the streets until the 1990s, when the city invested heavily in the neighbourhood's infrastructure. Some restaurants in these lanes have been operating in the same building for over a century. The Gothic Quarter is not a reconstruction or a preservation project — it is simply where the city's oldest layers survived, because the buildings were too solid to knock down and too historic to ignore.

Go into the cloister, through the side entrance. This is one of the strangest and most delightful spaces in Barcelona. In the cloister garden, thirteen white geese live in a pen around a fountain. They have been here, without interruption, for centuries. The geese are kept in honour of Santa Eulàlia, the co-patron of Barcelona — she was martyred at the age of thirteen in 303 AD, during the persecution of Christians under the Emperor Diocletian. Thirteen geese, one for each year of her life. The tradition is so embedded that when the Cathedral was damaged during the Spanish Civil War, the geese were the first thing restored.

In the crypt below the main altar, Eulàlia's sarcophagus lies in an alabaster tomb carved in the fourteenth century. Her relics were brought to Barcelona in 878 AD and the Cathedral was built, in large part, to house them. Climb to the rooftop terrace for the view over the Gothic Quarter — the medieval roofline, the Roman towers, the Sagrada Família's towers visible in the distance. The contrast between this civic, ancient place and the mystical vision you stood inside this morning tells you something essential about Barcelona: a city that has always contained arguments about what beauty is for.

The museum's collection is strongest in these early years, and what it shows is astonishing. The teenage and twenty-something Picasso could paint with academic precision that would have made him a conventional success had he chosen that path. The portraits, the figure studies, the landscapes — technically flawless, beautifully observed, completely unlike anything we associate with the name Picasso. This is the foundation he built on and then spectacularly destroyed.

The Blue Period works from his Barcelona years are here. So is the extraordinary series 'Las Meninas' — fifty-eight variations on the Velázquez painting, made in 1957 when Picasso was seventy-six years old, sixty years after leaving Barcelona, still in conversation with the Spanish tradition. The museum feels like a sustained argument between a young man and the old man he became, conducted over sixty years of work.

The city's claim on Picasso is real even though he lived most of his adult life in France. He learned to be an artist here. Barcelona gave him the visual language he spent the rest of his life breaking.

What is not in dispute is what happened near this spot. Columbus returned from his first voyage in March 1493 and was received by Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs, who were resident in Barcelona at the time. He presented them with gold, parrots, cotton, and several Taíno people he had brought from the Caribbean. The reception was held in the Royal Palace in the Gothic Quarter, a few hundred metres from where you stand. The monument commemorates that return, and the elevator inside the column takes you to a viewing platform sixty metres up, where you can see the full length of the Rambla stretching back to Plaça de Catalunya.

Behind you, the old port — the Port Vell — was transformed for the 1992 Olympics, which remade this entire stretch of coastline. Before the Olympics, Barcelona had no public beach. The port was industrial, the waterfront closed to the city. The Olympic project tore out rail lines and warehouses, built the Vila Olímpica neighbourhood, and gave Barcelona five kilometres of public beach. The city that had turned its back on the sea for a century suddenly faced it.

Walk out along the Rambla del Mar, the floating wooden footbridge that extends into the port basin. The Barceloneta beach is to your left, the open Mediterranean ahead. This is the city Gaudí, Columbus, and the anonymous medieval builders of the Gothic Quarter were all, in their different ways, building toward: a place where the streets end at the sea, and the sea begins at the city.