The street names are trades, and the city that keeps the register says do not trust them too far

Walk from the cathedral towards the sea and the street signs stop being names and start being a job list. Silversmiths. Mirror-makers. Coopers. Blanket-makers. Money-changers. Needle-makers.

It is the best free thing to read in Barcelona, the city publishes the etymology of every one of them, and the same city publishes a warning underneath that almost nobody quotes.

We are going to do both, in that order.

The list, with the city’s own wording

Every entry below is from the Ajuntament’s Nomenclàtor, the official register of Barcelona’s street names, which gives an etymology for each of its 4,688 streets.

Carrer de l’Argenteria — the silversmiths. They settled here in greatest numbers. The street was already called this in 1423.

Carrer de Mirallers — the mirror-makers. In 1492 it was already known by this name. Note the form: de Mirallers, not dels.

Carrer de la Tapineria — and this is the one to know. Workshops making tapins: in the register’s own description, a kind of sandal of cork lined with leather with a cloth covering, formerly used by women.

That is the street the tallest surviving run of Roman wall stands on. Thousands of people photograph the wall every week and none of them know the street is named after women’s cork-soled shoes.

Carrer dels Assaonadors — the tanners, whose work needed running water, like that which passed along the street. The etymology contains the drainage plan.

Carrer de les Semoleres — the women who sold semolina. Feminine plural, deliberately. The street had the name by 1603, and the men’s confraternity, the Semolers, dates from 1611. The women got the street.

Carrer d’Escudellers — the potters, working the yellowish clays.

Carrer dels Corders — the rope-makers, guild confraternity founded 1404 — and a nuance the register bothers to make: they worked outside the city walls, because you cannot lay a rope in an alley. What they had here were the warehouses and the shops.

Carrer de Flassaders — the makers of flassades, blankets. Guild ordinances dated 1331.

Carrer dels Boters — the coopers. Guild house 1448, first ordinances 1441.

Carrer de Freneria — the freners, who worked the leather for riding saddles and bridles.

Carrer de la Dagueria — the dagger-makers. The name is earlier than the sixteenth century.

Carrer dels Canvis Vells and Carrer dels Canvis Nous — the money-changers of the thirteenth century, and the taula del canvi, the public exchange bank, of 1401.

Carrer de la Llibreteria — the booksellers, and the register’s phrasing is worth keeping: the sale of books had centralised here, a great novelty of that time, at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Carrer dels Cotoners — the cotton workers, constituted as a guild in 1433, and already represented in the first municipal council of 1257.

Carrer dels Agullers — makers of needles and fishing tackle. Ordinances 1786; the street name is older, pre-1778.

Carrer de la Vidrieria — the glaziers, established here in the thirteenth century.

Carrer dels Sombrerers — the hatters, and this one shows the machinery moving. The guild’s 1545 ordinances call them capellers; by 1658 the guild calls itself barreters; and the name sombrerers was probably adopted towards the end of the seventeenth century. Three words for hat-maker in one street name over 150 years.

And a few more the register confirms in the same terms: Abaixadors (cloth-shearers, ordinances 1456), Blanqueria (where the tanners cured the skins), Carders (wool-carders, confraternity 1372, with the guild house still standing at numbers 45–49), Espaseria (swordsmiths, guild known from 1390, ordinances 1413) and Brocaters (brocade-makers, originally Broquerers, makers of small shields).

Three that look like trades and are not

Carrer del Vidre. Not the glaziers. The register says it is named after a glass kiln that gave its name to an estate, l’Hort del Vidre. The glaziers are one street away, on the Vidrieria.

Carrer dels Vigatans. Not a trade at all. It was an inn used by merchants from Vic, and the register explicitly rejects the beam-makers reading that circulates.

Carrer dels Banys Nous. Baths, not a guild — and rather older than the guilds. The register records a contract by Ramon Berenguer IV with the alfaquí Abraham in 1160, and that the baths subsisted until 1716. It is the western edge of El Call, and the name is the reason that boundary is where it is.

Now the warning, which is the good part

The Ajuntament’s own page on the memory of the guilds opens by saying exactly what every guidebook says: street names are the trace of the guilds we recognise most easily today.

And then, in the next paragraph, it does something guidebooks never do:

The existence of a relation between the names of the streets and the location of the trades could come to seem, at first glance, clear. But some qualifications would have to be raised.

The qualifications it raises:

• Streets changed names repeatedly. A trade reference could be lost, swapped for another, or — the interesting one — introduced at a later renaming. A street can be named after a guild by people who were nostalgic for it, not by the guild.
• There were far more trades than streets. The hearth census of 1516 records 195 different trades in Barcelona. The street signs give you a couple of dozen. What you are reading is not a map of the medieval economy. It is a very partial index of it.

There is a second, sharper version of the same objection published by the city, and it is in a book the Ajuntament itself put out about Carrer de Montcada, the grandest street in the quarter. Its verdict on the neighbourhood: no radical separations are observed, neither by trades nor by social groups.

Which is to say: the tidy picture — one street, one guild, everybody living over the shop with their own kind — is a nineteenth-century way of imagining the Middle Ages, and the institution that keeps the register is the one telling you so.

A trap for anyone who goes and checks

The register’s entries carry a field labelled Segle — century. It is not the age of the street or of the trade.

Mirallers shows Segle XIX while its own text dates the name to 1492. Llibreteria shows Segle XX with an approval date of 1958. The register never documents what the field means, and almost every trade street shows the nineteenth century — which is when the modern register was formalised, not when the hatters arrived.

If you go and read these entries yourself, which you should, ignore that column.

The street that is not a trade at all

Carrer de Montcada, on the far side of Via Laietana, is the counter-example that makes the rest legible.

The Generalitat lists it as a Conjunt històric, register 45-CH, by decree of 26 December 1947. It was laid out from the mid-twelfth century, has been known by its present name since 1283, and became the centre of Barcelona’s seigneurial life in the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries — until the opening of Carrer de la Princesa cut it in two in 1853.

Five of its palaces are the Museu Picasso, which describes them itself: Palau Aguilar, Palau del Baró de Castellet, Palau Meca, Casa Mauri and Palau Finestres, originals of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a good example of Catalan civil Gothic.

And even here the city argues with itself. The street register credits the name to the noble Montcada lineage; the Ajuntament’s own published study says that attribution is falsely made, and that the street is named after Martí de Montcada, a citizen who entered the Consell de Cent in 1258 and owned land there. One arm of the city says aristocrats, the other says a man who bought some plots.

We are not resolving that. We are telling you it is open, which is the honest state of it.

How to walk it

Do not make a route out of this. Make it a habit for two hours.

The trade streets are almost all between the cathedral and the sea, on both sides of Via Laietana, and you will cross a dozen of them following any sensible route through the old city. The change is that you stop reading the signs as decoration.

The best sequence, if you want one: come down Argenteria from Plaça de l’Àngel — you are on the eleventh-century road to the sea, which is why it runs at that angle — and it delivers you to the door of Santa Maria del Mar, the church the silversmiths’ street was built towards. Then Mirallers, Sombrerers, Assaonadors, Flassaders. Fifteen minutes, no tickets, and every sign is a source.

And when the trade streets run out, you have reached the edge: the ring roads are where the wall was.

The version with someone reading them out

Our Gothic Quarter walk works the cathedral side of Via Laietana and spends two hours on what is genuinely old, what was assembled in the twentieth century, and how to tell. The street names belong to the first category and are one of the few things in that neighbourhood nobody moved — see the buildings that did move.

The after-dark version has an unfair advantage here: the signs are lit and there is nobody standing in front of them.

Both are told by an actor rather than recited, and neither will tell you that one street held one guild, because the city that keeps the register does not say that either.

The same guilds sent animals into the Corpus procession — the tanners a lion, the cloth-dressers a mule, the butchers an ox — and almost every one of those figures in the street today was carved after 1987. That is the giants and the bestiary.