Barri Gotic and the History of Barcelona

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St. Eulalie Cathedral

Barcelona's Barri Gotic is the medieval stone city winding between Roman walls, where you can peer into excavations of a long long history. And everywhere, on Sunday, there are musicians--a violinist as we entered Cathedral Square, and a wind orchestra at the steps of the church played Zarzuela and Saradana pieces for the older crowd, who threw their backpacks in the center of a circle and began to dance. On corners and in passages classical guitarists play, there are velvet-voiced troubadors, and sometimes even popular music blasting. A woman with her leg in a cast sings Ave Maria to the accoustics of the medieval city, She is a singing professor, and fills the square with eerily beautiful but faltering tones, casting her quick teacher's glance at the passerbys. A clarinet wails with an enormous Arabian sort of guitar. A long haired toothless old guy bangs on his guitar, channeling heavy metal and Dylan. We wandered among hidden shady squares into the marble baroque St. Philip of Neri, where an organist struck up Baroque music.

Roman walls

Inside the Cathedral

The Cathedral of St. Eulalie is a cavernous monumental Catalan gothic, its many large side altars of dressed madonnas and gothic retables. One of them holds the angular Christ of Lepanto, the ship figurehead for the battle that defeated the Turks in 1571. Mass was beginning and screens reared up from behind the choirs. The cloister has delicate high arches where white geese, almost like swans, groomed their huge immaculate feathers and periodically broke out in fights. Just outside azulejos, painted enamel plaques, described an uprising against Napoleon, the rebels cruelly garrotted while some hid for 72 hours under the organ.

The Museum of the History of Barcelona was free after 3pm (like many of Barcelona's museums) so we waited. (The following outline of the city's history comes partly also from another museum, that of the History of Catalunya near the port.) We walked through displays of prehistoric Barcelona which had been right on the sea. There was a small skull with ritual holes bored into it, and pottery from the archaic era.

Roman well

The Barri Gotic stands over excavations of a much earlier history. Humans were in Catalunya between 700,000 and 10,000 BC, small nomadic groups in caves and rock shelters in an inhospitable climate. By 2,500 BC copper and gold ornaments were shaped, houses built and cereals stored, wheat and barley cultivated and trade networks formed.

Romanesque church interior

From 1250-700 BC waves of migration from central Europe and communications from beyond the Pyrenees combined to make the Iberian culture one of the most important during the western Mediterranean Iron Age (700-550 BC), enjoying extensive contact with Phoenicians and Greeks. There were urban and trading networks, minted coins and a writing system. The Iberians shared deities with other cults around the Mediterannean, revering forces of nature, performing animal sacrifice and cremation.

The Romans established Barcino around 15 BC with the cult of Augustus. You can still see (elsewhere in the Barri Gotic) huge Roman columns of the temple, where once the forum stood. In the museum basement there is an early Roman bath, overlaid with a later Roman fish salting factory, later built over as a wine press that was taken over by the Visigoths who built a church there 4th to 6th c AD.

Wolves, an emblem of Barcino

A Roman cemetery has been uncovered in the Barri Gotic, with the sarcophagi of a wet nurse, and a wife, among others, in rough stone mounds, touching tumuli of materials at hand. A little museum there told us in Spanish that the dead were nailed into their graves to prevent them from returning to the land of the living, and as elsewhere, on certain days of the year family descended to the crypts to feast with the dead.

Bishop of the 13th c.

The 4-5th c. AD were years of crisis for the declining Roman Empire, except in Barcino which was perfectly located for a wealthy regional framework with excellent natural communications. Heavily fortified, it was also a centre of conspiracies and uprisings. The Visigoths made it their capital in the 6th c, but the local peoples retained their Roman law. Catalunya continued to enjoy strong trade in port cities where Jewish, Greek and Syrian minorities prevailed.

The Arabs arrived in 711 and throughout the 8th century controlled the region--first from the Emirate and later from the Caliphate of Cordova, part of Al-Andalus. Islam was not only a religion, but a culture and a vast unified market, with hitherto unknown products and techniques such as irrigation.

The peasants who created Catalunya

We traveled upstairs to see the fortunes of Barcelona after a brief century of Arab rule. The Frankish army took Barcelona by siege in 800-801, led by Louis le Pieux, son of Charlemagne, and Guillaume of Toulouse. Overcome by hunger, Barcelona surrendered on 3 April 801, but Charlemagne granted a broad charter of liberties.

Gothic retable

During this century the Pyrenees were densely populated by people fleeing Germanic invasions and Muslim conquest. Peasants moved down towards the lowlands and plain, settling in unpopulated areas. Through hard work they made the land fertile. It was they who were the true conquerors and colonisers of Old Catalunya, the Museum of the History of Catalunya tells us.

Christianity coexisted alongside pagan beliefs and ritual practices--offerings to the dead, fecundity rituals, sun worship, veneration of the forces of nature. Pre-Romanesque and Romanesque churches were built on sites sacred from ancient times. Festivities took place during those rare seasons when work was finished. Occasionally, jugglers and minstrels arrived to do tricks and tell stories to the villagers.

Cloister of St. Eulalie

The crown of Aragon gained control of Catalunya 1137 when Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona wed Peronella, daughter of Ramir II of Aragon. Military conquests and new religious orders including the Knights Templar consolidated newly conquered lands. Catalunya became fully incorporated into the troubador culture from over the Pyrenees--prominent Catalan poets and troubadors are still remembered. With the French crusaders' victory over Catalan and Occitan, at the Battle of Muret in 1213, the ties were broken. But courtly love and the values of generosity and liberty spread throughout Europe to influence literature and thinking.

Centuries' old giant puppets

By the end of the 13th c., Barcelona expanded beyond its walls to 40,000 inhabitants. The Jews, whose quarter still has the old synagogue, were increasingly discriminated against and wore distinctive patches. Their hygienic practices and segregation kept them safe from the plague--consequently, they were blamed for it.

St. Eulalie's martyrdom

The Barri Gotic is a labyrinth of venerable 14th c buildings so clustered together that it is difficult to appreciate them. On the sunny plaza of the Generalitat a wispy bride (the second of the Sunday) stood in the midst of an acrobatic troupe--perhaps one of them. Behind them two of the giant puppets that have been kept for hundreds of years, Els Gegants, beamed down like family members solicitous of the affairs below. Also on the plaza is City Hall, with exquisite gothic facades and Renaissance archways. Inside it a gleaming black marble staircase leads past a 20th c. folk art mural of Catalunya, up to the important Salo de Cent with its 14th c. reliefs. A 19th c jewel of an amphitheatre bears a large portrait of a worried looking Regent, flanked by very Romantic status of St. George looking mischieveous and erotic as he casually tramples his dragon, and lovely St. Eulalie, patron saint of Barcelona.