Gràcia joined Barcelona in 1897 with almost no public buildings, so its clubs built their own

Barcelona’s own history page for this neighbourhood contains a sentence that explains more about Gràcia than anything else the city publishes about it.

Describing the town at the moment of annexation, in 1897, with almost 62,000 inhabitants:

a very populous and active city, but with a great lack of facilities and services.

Sixty-two thousand people and nothing municipal to put them in. What happened instead is on the doorways: a town that could not build itself a library, a concert hall, a school or a billiard room got them anyway, from societies that raised the money among their own members and put up the building themselves.

That is the thing Gràcia actually has, and it is invisible unless somebody tells you which names to read.

The oldest one is on a small square and it is still open

Lluïsos de Gràcia, Plaça del Nord 7. The municipal register of citizens’ associations records its year of constitution as 1855, and the association says the same on its own site: a socio-cultural and sporting association founded in 1855 in the Vila de Gràcia.

Eighteen fifty-five. Five years after the town became a municipality, forty-two before it stopped being one.

The one that came out of a revolution, and was built by Gaudí’s right hand

El Centre — properly the Centre Moral i Instructiu de Gràcia, on Ros de Olano.

Its own archive dates the founding to 2 February 1869, and gives the political weather it was founded in: after the September 1868 revolution dethroned Isabel II and gave freedom of association, teaching and religion, a group of leading men of the town and of Barcelona — together with some members of the Lluïsos de Gràcia — set it up, with the primary aim of promoting Catholic schools in the town.

Note the mechanism. A liberal revolution frees up the right of association, and the first thing conservative Gràcia does with the new freedom is found a Catholic teaching society. Both halves of that are true at once, and it is a decent corrective to the idea of a uniformly radical neighbourhood.

A discrepancy, small and explicable. The city’s register carries 1871 for this entity; the Centre’s own archive carries 1869, and separately records that in 1871 the Centre’s schools officially began operating. So the municipal file is almost certainly holding the schools’ date rather than the society’s. We are giving you both, and the reason we think they differ.

The building came later, and it is the good part. In 1904 the Centre bought number 7 of what was then carrer de Las Gracias and built its present premises. Its own archive names the architect: the author of the project is Francesc Berenguer i Mestres.

Which is corroborated, at one remove, by the municipal heritage catalogue — whose author field for this building reads “Francesc Berenguer i Mestres; project: by Miquel Pascual”, because Berenguer had no architect’s qualification and could not sign. That whole arrangement, across seven buildings in this district, is the man who built modernista Gràcia and was not allowed to sign it.

The catalogue on the façade: where Berenguer demonstrates the expressive possibilities he knew how to extract from constructive materials and, especially, from ceramic brick. Go and look at it. It costs nothing and nobody else will be there.

A choir from 1904 that has sung under Stravinsky

The Orfeó Gracienc. Founded in 1904 by Joan Balcells, who directed it until 1939; the encyclopedia and the choir’s own site agree on the year and the man. Its public debut was on 15 August 1905 — which is Festa Major week, then as now.

And then this, from the encyclopedia, which we did not expect to find:

In 1934 it took part in the first performance in Spain of the Symphony of Psalms, at the Palau de la Música Catalana, conducted by the composer himself, Igor Stravinsky.

A neighbourhood choir from a recently annexed factory town, thirty years old, singing a Stravinsky premiere with Stravinsky on the podium.

A correction we owe. An earlier pass of this journal recorded that the 1904 founding of the Orfeó Gracienc had no institutional backing, and dropped it. That was wrong: the Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana has an entry, and it is unambiguous. The failure was in the search, not in the fact.

The billiard hall that is listed under a name nobody uses

Carrer de Maspons 6, which everybody in the neighbourhood calls La Violeta and which is now a municipal centre for older people.

Look for it in the heritage catalogue under that name and you will not find it. The building at that address is listed as the Sociedad de Fomento Voluntario de la Vila de Gràcia, built in 1893 by the master builder Jaume Gustà i Bondia.

What makes the entry worth reading is that the catalogue describes what was inside, room by room:

The ground floor… had, facing the doorway on carrer Maspons, a monumental staircase and, behind it, a coffee room and a billiard room. On the upper floor there was a ballroom and a rest room.

A ballroom, a coffee room and a billiard room, in a two-storey building, put up by an improvement society in a town that had just lost its own council. And on the front, under a semicircular pediment, the Gràcia shield with its three lilies — which, the catalogue notes, gives the building a certain air of a town hall.

That is a neighbourhood building itself a town hall because it no longer has one. The same three lilies are worked into the ironwork of the Mercat de la Llibertat five minutes away.

One honest caveat. The catalogue never writes the words La Violeta. The connection between the listed 1893 building and the name people use is the address, which the city’s own register of facilities gives as Maspons 6 for both. That is a strong link and it is not a citation.

The cooperative that became the Teatre Lliure — and the one that did not

Carrer de Montseny 47. The catalogue’s entry for it is titled, in full:

COOPERATIVA “LA LLEIALTAT”. TEATRE LLIURE

Original use: cultural and recreational. Built, it says, probably at the end of the nineteenth century, without much ornamental pretension — the cast-iron pillars of the ground floor and the staircase date from then — and then, around the nineteen-thirties, somebody organised the pretentious façade onto Montseny, three bays with the outer two done up as little towers.

The catalogue’s author field is blank. Nobody knows who built it.

In 1976, in that room, Fabià Puigserver and three others founded the Teatre Lliure. The theatre’s own page says it plainly: former seat of the Cooperativa La Lleialtat, in 1976 the Teatre Lliure was founded here. It ran as a cooperative itself until 1988 — a theatre company organised on the same legal model as the grocery society whose hall it had taken over. The Gràcia venue closed for works in November 2003 and came back in September 2010.

And now the part that trips everybody up, including us.

There is a second Lleialtat. La Lleialtat Santsenca is a different cooperative building, in Sants, at Olzinelles 31, by the architect Josep Alemany, built in 1927, and reopened as a community-run municipal facility in January 2018. It is the one whose restoration story is widely told.

An earlier pass of this journal concluded from the Sants building that “La Lleialtat” was not a Gràcia institution at all, and dropped a planned piece on the subject. Wrong again, and in the more embarrassing direction: there are two, and the Gràcia one is in the municipal heritage catalogue with its own record number.

What nobody publishes is when the Gràcia cooperative was founded. The catalogue says only end of the nineteenth century; the theatre gives no date. If you find a year for it in print, ask where it came from.

The numbers, with a warning attached

The city keeps a public register of citizens’ associations. Counting it ourselves, there are 5,861 registered entities across Barcelona, of which 569 are in the district of Gràcia — fifth of ten districts, behind the Eixample, Ciutat Vella, Sants-Montjuïc and Sant Martí.

Within the district, the distribution is the interesting part: 349 of those 569 are in la Vila de Gràcia alone, against 101 in Camp d’en Grassot i Gràcia Nova, 60 in Vallcarca i els Penitents, 38 in la Salut and 21 in el Coll. Roughly three in five of the district’s associations are inside one small, dense neighbourhood — the one that used to be the town.

Two warnings on those figures. They are our tally of a municipal file, not a headline the Ajuntament publishes. And Gràcia is not the biggest by count; anybody who tells you it is the most associative district in Barcelona is asserting a density figure that the city does not publish, and neither will we. What the Ajuntament does say, qualitatively, is that Gràcia has always had and still maintains an active political and social life and a rich fabric of civic, cultural, recreational, artistic and sporting institutions with deep popular roots.

Theatres, not cinemas

One more count, from the city’s register of cultural venues. In the district of Gràcia there are three places classified as cinemas — the two Verdi sites and the Bosque, all in la Vila de Gràcia — against twenty-two classified as theatres or auditoriums.

Gràcia’s reputation is film. Its municipal filing is stage. And one of those twenty-two is the Sala Lliure at Montseny 47, which is a grocery cooperative. What the evening is actually like up here, which is not what the nightlife lists promise, is Gràcia at night.

The politics is in the street names

The associations are one half of the story and the street signs are the other. The register of street names records that carrer de la Fraternitat and carrer de la Llibertat are both dedicated in homage to one of the three principles assumed by the French Revolution — and that carrer de la Fraternitat was previously called Lealtad, loyalty, until 1907.

Carrer del Progrés, between Llibertat and Siracusa, is dedicated with a phrase that could only have been written by a town council:

to all the manifestations of progress that the population of this town has rendered.

And there is a Plaça de la Revolució de Setembre de 1868 — the revolution that, three months later, made the Centre Moral legally possible.

Which is the pattern of this neighbourhood in one paragraph. From the middle of the nineteenth century Gràcia was, in the encyclopedia’s words, one of the most active nuclei of the federal and workers’ movements of the Barcelona plain — and when it rose in March 1870 against conscription, it did so under the direction of the Centre Republicà Federal. An association again. That week, and the bell that did not stop ringing, is the revolt of the quintes.

What to do with this on a walk

Look up at doorways. The societies are still behind several of them, and they mostly do not advertise.

Plaça del Nord, for the Lluïsos and because it is one of the quieter squares. Ros de Olano, for Berenguer’s brickwork. Maspons 6, for the three lilies on the pediment. Montseny 47, for the theatre that was a shop.

None of it costs anything, and none of it is on a list. Where the squares are, in an order that does not double back, is what to see in Gràcia, and the case for why any of this is worth an afternoon is is Gràcia worth visiting.

Or have it acted at you

Our Gràcia walking tour works exactly these decades — the town with sixty-two thousand people and no public buildings — with an actor for a guide, which is not the same as a tour in costume. Three hours, ten people, and a glass of vermouth at the end, which is an institution of its own.

One of those cooperative buildings, La Lleialtat, became the first home of the Teatre Lliure in 1976 — a company that did not move to Montjuïc until 2001. That story is here.