Beyond much argument, the most beautiful Gothic church in Barcelona—or in Spain, some would insist—is Santa Maria del Mar. Certainly it is the one I always visit and consult first when I want to feel completely back in Barcelona. It stands at the bottom of the Ribera quarter, where the city meets the sea, and is essentially dedicated to the strong, traditionally thriving relation between Barcelona and its working citizens. That is why, without sentimentality, one loves it so: There is little trace of the aristocratic grandeur, the slightly condescending too-muchness, of “nobler” Spanish churches.
Ritual use of this site goes back a long way. The original church or shrine, of which no visible trace survives, may have been Barcelona’s first episcopal seat at the time of Constantine, in the fourth century. Its construction began only a little later than the Pi’s, in 1329, and took slightly more than half a century to complete.
Its first cult was dedicated to Santa Eulàlia, patroness of Barcelona, but when her relics were moved to the Cathedral a new and much bigger church began to rise on the site of the old, dedicated to Christ’s mother in her role as patroness of mariners—Holy Mary of the Sea. That is why an ancient model of a deep-bellied nef or working caravel stands on its altar.
By now the Ribera quarter around the shrine was getting prosperous and its streets were named for specific guilds—Carrer del Argenteria (silversmithing), Carrer dels Sombrerers (hatmakers), and so on. Being on the sea’s edge, the church was associated with haulers, porters, and the bastaixos, as longshoremen were called. All made heavy cash contributions to its building. On the main altar of Santa Maria del Mar are two squat stone relief carvings of stevedores carrying their loads. Not for nothing has Santa Maria always been viewed as a place made by workers for workers. According to the chronicles, most of the able-bodied male population of the Ribera gave it their labor and time for more than fifty years. Of its four great Gothic vaults, the last was closed in November 1383.
Massive, square, forthright, heavy, this is not lacy Gothic. Its imagery of shelter recalls, in equal measure, the caves of the Pyrenees and the fortress-churches of Cistercian Catalunya. But there is no more solemn architectural space in Spain. Granted, the interior of Santa Maria del Mar was considerably improved by the anticlericals and anarchists who, during the civil war, made a huge mound inside the nave of pews, wooden sculpture, and confessionals, even the incongruous baroque high altar, and set fire to it. The conflagration lasted eleven days, turned the church into a white-hot kiln, but, amazingly, failed to bring down its structure. Only the bones remain, but those bones are so beautiful that one cannot regret the loss of the ornament.
The plan of Santa Maria is basilican, a central nave with two flanking aisles that swing around behind the high altar to form a semicircular apse. Chapels are set between the counterfort stub walls that oppose the outward thrust of the roof. The nave columns, which rise to only a little more than half the nave’s height, are plain octagons in section. From their thin capitals, hardly more than gilded rings, spring the ribs of the roof. These ribs are the plainest of stone pipes, and their linear definition against the surfaces of wall and vault is intensely moving in its purity and strictness. This spareness is emphasized by spacing, for the columns of Santa Maria del Mar are farther apart than those of any other Gothic church in Europe—about forty-three feet.
When I was a little Catholic boy I used to resent being forced to traipse to Mass on Sundays, because the Church of St. Mary Magdalen in Rose Bay, Sydney, like everything in it, was so boring and ugly with its atmosphere of sterile plaster-cast purity. To this day there is a certain shade of blue whose mincing pallidness I cannot endure; it is the color given to the Virgin’s robe by the firm of Antonio Pellegrini & Fratelli, ecclesiastical decorators of Sydney. But I could (well, maybe) imagine remaining a good little Catholic if the church had been more like Santa Maria del Mar. Perhaps there should have been some anarchists around to burn the pious rubbish, although the sight of the column of smoke pouring upward into the Australian blue would have been too much for the bankers and brewers who had been to early Mass and were now immersed in their drives and chip shots on the nearby course of Royal Sydney Golf Club.
TWO
AFTER ITS BRILLIANT ACHIEVEMENTS IN THE FOURTEENTH century, could Barcelona sustain such cultural momentum? Alas, no, and the reasons were several. No city, however energetic, can be expected to keep up such a level for long. Fine buildings continued to be erected in Barcelona: the fifteenth-and sixteenth-century parts of the Palau de la Generalitat, the building on Plaça Sant Jaume that houses the government of the state of Catalunya, are among those which testify to that. There are also the beautiful palaus (palaces) and town houses of Carrer Montcada, a strikingly well-preserved street that goes from the corner of Santa Maria del Mar, across the Carrer Princesa to the tiny Plaça Marcus, where the diminutive twelfth-century Capilla (Chapel) de Marcus still stands—the point from which, in the Middle Ages, most travelers heading north to France began their journey.
It is rarely possible to say where a very old town street began its existence, but Carrer Montcada is an exception: It was created from scratch in 1148, as a planned whole, by the last man to rule over Barcelona as a count-king before Catalunya’s fusion with Aragon, Ramón Berenguer.
The buildings that defined Carrer Montcada in the twelfth century are all gone now, replaced, in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries or later, by the palaces of the very rich, whose frowning street walls (no setbacks here for pedestrians) and squinting windows seem as unwelcoming, if not actually hostile, to the passerby as the clan palazzi on the narrow streets of Florence.
The typical palau was built between party walls and around an inner court, with storage and workrooms on the ground floor and a vaulted staircase, often richly decorated, leading to the living space and ceremonial rooms above. Having been recycled into museums and art galleries, most of them are now open to the public. The Palau Dalmases (No. 20, now the Omnium Cultural) has some fifteenth-century vaulting, but the main feature of its courtyard is the staircase, with finely carved seventeenth-century columns and a balustrade whose sharply inclined panels bear baroque allegories of Catalan sea trade and naval victory carved in marble in shallow relief. Neptune, with his attendant nymphs and sea horses, goes charging through the white stone foam—but uphill, following the pitch of the staircase at thirty degrees or so.
The Casa Cervelló-Giudice (No. 25, now the Galerie Maeght) was built by Catalans and purchased in the eighteenth century by a foreign trading family from Genoa. It has the best external courtyard staircase of all, its vaults carried on fifteenth-century stone columns so exaggeratedly slender that the slightest movement in the subsoil would have brought them down; on first sight you would think they were cast iron, not limestone.
There is not much baroque building in Barcelona, because the city’s cultural history ran so opposite to that of Madrid; years of prosperity in one were almost always a time of recession in the other, what with ever increasing competition from Castile, overseas pressure, costly civil wars and reckless policies of urban expansion that Barcelona’s own capital base could not sustain. The period of the sixteenth to mid-nineteenth century enclosed, for Castile, its so-called golden century, its siglo d’oro. Not in Catalunya, where the same period was known as the Decadencia, in which little worthy of pride or remark happened in the arts of painting, poetry, music, or architecture, and the power of the city itself contracted even as Madrid’s was bursting out into worldwide hegemony. There was no Catalan Velázquez and, even though he recuperated in Barcelona for a time and praised its life and customs extravagantly, no Catalan Cervantes either. In Castile, baroque and realism are almost all; in Catalunya they are nearly nothing. Barcelona is very short, for instance, of fine neoclassic buildings from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One good group stands on the seafront, the Porxos d’en Xifré, or Mr. Xifré’s porches—Xifré, having become rich on the colonial transatlantic trade in slaves and coffe
e, wished like many other indianos to leave a mark on his home city. (It seems fitting that his name, in Catalan, meant “number.”) It contains a well-known restaurant, the Seven Doors, solid and reliable if not the best in Barcelona, which performs for the city some of the functions of La Coupole in Paris or Balthazar in New York—the production of copious amounts of good vernacular food for a large clientele both of locals and of tourists. It is a trustworthy place and worth visiting, even if you may no longer feel any special desire to sit at the table where, a brass plaque still informs the visitor, Ernest Hemingway once ate. Why this should be considered a gastronomic recommendation, the Lord only knows.
The Ramblas holds two neoclassic palaces, the only other ones of interest in Barcelona. One (Ramblas, No. 99) is the Palau de la Virreina, and the other Palau Moja (Ramblas, No. 118). The Virreina is a pile of epic and bulbous proportions, built by the extremely corrupt captain-general of Chile, Manuel d’Amat i de Junyent, who in 1761 had received from his king the juiciest of all colonial plums, the viceroyalty of Peru, whose chief perk was unsupervised control of the richest silver deposit in the known world, the fabled mines of Potosí, an invitation to plunder that no red-blooded, sticky-fingered Catalan could possibly refuse.
It would be cruel and unusual punishment to subject the reader to an account of the various civil wars and disturbances that weakened Catalunya on the way to and during the siglo d’oro, but they should at least be indicated.
By 1462 there had begun a confused melee between the monarchy and the ruling class which ruptured most of the long-standing contracts between the throne, the Generalitat, and Barcelona’s city government. This resulted in 1479 in the emergence of Ferdinand II (the Catholic) as ruler of Catalunya. Ferdinand then married the future Isabel I of Castile; who, on ascending the Castilian throne, wrote an end to the long independence of Catalunya that had begun, six hundred years before, with Wilfred the Hairy.
Then came the Reapers’ War (1640-1652), a drawn-out and slow-moving bloodbath started by peasant laborers in revolt against Habsburg rule.
Most catastrophic of all was the entry of Catalunya into the War of the Spanish Succession against the Bourbons, whom it could not defeat. This war started in 1701 and by the summer of 1714 all of Catalunya had been taken, except for Barcelona itself, which fought on alone, deserted by its allies.
The city had only about ten thousand soldiers, a force soon whittled down by gunfire, famine, and disease. Their resistance was anguished and stubborn, but it could not last long. Barcelona surrendered to the Bourbon army, led by James Stuart, duke of Berwick, on September 11, 1714, a date which might well be remembered as ignominious (as 9/11 now is in the United States), but which for some perverse reason is still celebrated as the national day of Catalunya.
The legend of eighteenth-century Bourbon tyranny still lives on, but its life is merely vestigial. True, there were vengeful Castilians who would have liked to see Barcelona razed and its citizens punished with the utmost severity short of death. But Felipe was not an exceptionally vengeful man, and once Berwick’s men had hanged some resisters and demolished some buildings to make their point, the Catalans settled down quite comfortably to do business with their conquerors, and prospered from it.
The worst thing the Bourbons did to Barcelona was to flatten hundreds of its buildings, mostly houses and shops, and erect a series of walls across these cleared sites, to turn it into an enormous fort: the Ciutadella, or Citadel. As a result, the military installations of the city covered almost as much land as its civilian and commercial buildings; it was given new and vastly stronger walls, which left it no room to grow. Since living space in barris like the Ribera was already tight and a breeding ground for pestilence and misery, this was bitterly resented by the citizens. Barcelona’s great priest-poet, Jacint Verdaguer, looked back on these humiliations from a much later time in the 1880s:
The happiest quarter of Barcelona is erased
like a number drawn in the sand, on the beach.
When, like water drained away, no trace remains
of these stones, the bones of the beloved city,
they build a fortress,
the ill-fated and hateful Citadel,
born in Barcelona like erysipelas
in the middle of a lovely face.
The smashing down of the Ribera quarter, symbol of the tough spirit of the Barcelona workingman, settled deep into popular memory. Its scars humiliated every Barcelonan, and the Bourbon muralles, the new walls that clamped the monstrous outgrowth of the Citadel to the offended body of the city, were loathed as much as the Citadel itself. Probably not until the Berlin Wall would any imposed structure be so hated by those who lived in its shadow. The walls freighted every planning decision, every opinion, with extra meaning. Were you for democracy or the military? Catalan independence or Madrid centrality? Church or State? Your view of the muralles would tell. They were an absolutely clear symbol of where “progressive” ideas of social administration might be pointing. All “progressives” and Catalanists, though the two were not necessarily the same, agreed on that point. Before the city could return to its true self, before it could reforge its identity, it had to get rid of the muralles. An easy thing to say, but difficult to do.
Yet it was done—eventually, and with immense effort. In the meantime, however, more misfortunes awaited Barcelona. The summer of 1835 brought a blaze of violent anticlericalism to Barcelona’s always unstable working class, fanned by liberal extremists in reaction against the absolute monarchists and the Carlists. Ferdinand VII, the ultrareactionary Bourbon monarch, had died in 1833. Late in his life he had compared himself to the cork in a bottle of beer: Once it was pulled, he said, the liquid would foam out everywhere. So it proved to do. The next in line for the throne had been his daughter, the future Isabel II. The idea of being ruled by this child queen through a regent horrified many Spanish conservatives, including the late Fernando’s brother, Carlos María Isidro de Borbon, another extreme reactionary. His supporters, calling themselves the Carlists, wanted him for their king and refused to contemplate, let alone accept, a female heir to the throne. The result was a bloody, on-again-off-again battle between the Carlists on one hand and liberals and constitutionalists on the other. Barcelona’s citizen militia stood behind the liberals. The Church, with equal fervor, supported the Carlists. This converted Barcelona into a tinderbox and in 1835 there was an orgy of anticlerical violence and arson which became known as the Cremada dels Convents, the Burning of the Convents.
Supposedly, and indeed quite possibly, it began with the hysteria of the crowd at a bullfight in Barcelona, enraged by the poor quality of the corrida. But it rapidly engulfed the city, gutting scores of church buildings—among them, medieval masterpieces such as the thirteenth-to fourteenth-century church and convent of the Carme, which ranked with Santa Maria del Mar in architectural importance. The rage of workers found a second target in big business. On August 6, demonstrating against the mechanization of craft work, a crowd of the unemployed burned down the new Bonaplata works, Spain’s first steam factory and the pride of Catalan industry.
Then, after the fires, came the Mendizábal Laws. Juan Álvarez (1790-1853), a radical liberal who from 1835 was Isabel II’s minister of finance, saw as his chief duty the task of opening the Spanish economy and getting investment moving again. He, therefore, took what was probably the most daring step in the entire history of the real estate business, in Spain or anywhere else.
The biggest landlord in Barcelona (or in the rest of Spain) was the Church, and Mendizábal confiscated its properties, forcing them to be sold at auction. Thus four-fifths of the Church lands inside the walls of Barcelona were snapped up by eager secular clients. This saved the city from the moribund hand of the Church—a traumatic excision, but an essential one.
It still amazes me how much of nineteenth-century Barcelona, and how many of my favorite places within the Barri Gòtic, were built on sites cleared under the Mendizábal Laws. France
sc Daniel Molina’s great residential square, the Plaça Reial just off the Ramblas, is one. Everyone has at least one sad song of a lost real estate opportunity. Mine, which I feel like morosely humming whenever I stop in one of the bars of Plaça Reial for a cold beer on a hot day, or (even more sharply) when I go to visit my architect friends Beth Galí and Oriol Bohigas in their apartment above, is the lodgings in Plaça Reial that I never had the sense to secure.
Back in the 1970s this beautiful complex—planned like one of the residential squares of Paris, and in this respect almost unique among the places of Barcelona—was sadly rundown, the haunt of junkies and bedraggled whores, its tall shutters hanging awry, its stucco cracked, its lofty fourteen-foot apartment ceilings in miserable condition. You could have bought one of those ruinous palaces for next to nothing. Others did. I did not. Regret and sadness, especially since the fabric of the square, with its fountains and early Gaudí cast-iron streetlamps (cast iron being the bronze of nineteenth-century Barcelona), was so elegantly restored by Federico Correa a few years later.
Another spot nearby, more precious to me even than Plaça Reial, is the Mercat de Sant Antoni, the Market of St. Anthony, just off the other side of the Ramblas but a little uptown, the official name, which of course no one ever uses for that stupendous civic institution which everyone calls the Boqueria.
It is the hub and heart of both Barcelona’s gastronomy and its everyday eating. Its site was originally occupied by the sixteenth-century convent of Sant Josep and the fourteenth-century one of Santa Maria. Hang me for a gluttonous atheist if you will, but compared to the increase of human happiness afforded by this great market, the loss of a couple of convents is nothing.
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