The engineer everyone credits with the Barceloneta designed a neighbourhood that was never built

The Barceloneta is the most legible neighbourhood in Barcelona. One grid, one house type, one date. You can read the whole thing off the street in ten minutes, which is why it is worth knowing that almost everybody attributes it to the wrong man.

Verboom drew it. Cermeño built it. They are thirty-five years apart

The story you will be told is that after 1714 the Bourbons demolished the Ribera to build the Ciutadella, evicted its inhabitants, and built them the Barceloneta.

The first two are true. The third is a compression of thirty-five years and two different projects.

The Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana:

The captain general, the marquis of Castel-Rodrigo, thought, in 1718, of a district for those who had lost their house — many of them seafaring people — and commissioned the project from the military engineer Próspero de Verboom, the author of the Ciutadella. This project was not carried out, because of the war with Navarre, and because people found accommodation in other places, given the fall in the number of inhabitants the city experienced.

Read the second reason again. The rehousing scheme was abandoned partly because there were fewer people to rehouse. Barcelona had lost enough population that the problem solved itself, in the way problems solve themselves after a siege.

Then:

It was not until forty years later, in 1753, that the Barceloneta was definitively urbanised… The new district was the work of the military engineer Juan Martín Cermeño, and the works were directed by the engineer Francisco Paredes.

⚠️ And there are two Cermeños, which is the easiest mistake in the neighbourhood. The district is Juan Martín Cermeño’s, the father. The church of Sant Miquel del Port, in the middle of it, is Pedro Martín Cermeño’s, the son. Same surname, same profession, same square.

What had changed by 1753 was money. The encyclopaedia says Barcelona’s population doubled between 1718 and 1758, on cotton manufactures and the recovery of trade with America. The 1718 plan was drawn for a shrinking city; the 1753 one was executed by a growing one.

The houses are that shape because of the guns

This is the fact that reorganises the whole neighbourhood once you know it.

The blocks are long and thin, proportion 1 to 9, running north-south, parallel to the quay. They are divided into square plots of 8.4 metres. The streets are 7.4 metres wide. And the original houses were ground floor plus one storey —

so that they would not obstruct the action of the batteries of the Ciutadella.

That is not urban design. That is a field of fire, expressed as housing. The Bourbon fortress a few hundred metres away had to be able to shoot over the top of the district it had made necessary. Everything else follows: no interior courtyards, each house open to two streets, a rigorous set of regulations fixing the building materials, the segmental-arched openings, the volutes over the windows, the small pediment over the balcony, and the exterior paintwork in bright colours.

And the ownership arrangement matched. Plots were granted freehold, free of ground rent, by permission of the captain general — who held jurisdiction over the district, even though it was administratively part of Barcelona. Two barracks, one of cavalry and one of infantry, built between 1764 and 1779, held 1,200 men each.

The Ciutadella and the Barceloneta are not a fortress and a neighbourhood. They are one installation. The fortress is the other half of this story, and the excavation under the Born market is what its construction destroyed.

The military jurisdiction is why it looks old

Barcelona did not preserve the Barceloneta out of taste. It preserved it out of paperwork.

The residential space kept the original urban fabric and grew horizontally in bands parallel to the beach, maintaining the module and the type of building established at the moment of the district’s creation, given that until 1859 military jurisdiction continued over the Barceloneta.

A hundred and six years of frozen building regulations. When the freeze lifted, the neighbourhood did what every neighbourhood does: it went up.

From 1838 successive rules allowed extra floors, and in 1872 the Ajuntament, giving way to pressure from the owners’ association, authorised ground floor plus four storeys —

without taking into account that, given the width of the streets, part of the buildings were left without sun.

That sentence is the encyclopaedia’s, not ours. A municipality authorised a density that its own street plan could not light, and said so afterwards.

The quarter of a house

And then the dwellings themselves were cut up. First the floor was separated from the ground floor. Then each was divided in two. The results have names:

Mitja casa — half a house. And then:

Quart de casa — a quarter of a house. A rented dwelling of 28 square metres, which came to be predominant in the neighbourhood.

Twenty-eight square metres, rented, and the most common home in the district. That is what the flat-fronted eighteenth-century single-family house had turned into within a century and a half.

The population arc runs with it: around 31,000 in the first third of the twentieth century, and a peak in 1960 of more than 36,000 people at an average of 1,445 per hectare, on a triangle the encyclopaedia sizes at some 70 hectares. The shanty settlements had spread across almost the whole beach.

If you want a single number for what tourism did and did not do to this neighbourhood, that is the one to hold: the Barceloneta’s most crowded moment was sixty-six years ago and had nothing to do with visitors.

The ground is not ground

None of this is on land that existed when the city was founded.

The port’s own history is blunt about the geography: Barcelona had no natural maritime shelter, and the coastal dynamic meant a constant intake of sand. The first works for a safe harbour began in 1477, and — the port again —

the works were carried out in what would later be the seafaring district of the Barceloneta. These were the beginnings of the artificial port, built on land won from the sea.

The Ajuntament puts numbers to it, quoting Joan Alemany: from the start of the works in 1447, the beach advanced towards the sea some 500 metres up to 1697, and between 800 and 900 metres up to the present day. And it was on this land won from the sea that, in the eighteenth century, the district of the Barceloneta was created.

Eight hundred metres of new Barcelona. The Barceloneta is a sandbank that the harbour works trapped, and the houses were put on it forty years after it stopped moving.

What it is now, and how to walk it

Go inland, not along the front. The passeig and the beach are the part everyone sees and the least interesting. Two streets in, the grid does what it was designed to do: long, narrow, cross-ventilated, with sky at both ends of every street.

Count storeys as you walk. Where you see two, you are looking at the artillery rule. Where you see five, you are looking at 1872. The whole legal history is legible from the pavement.

Look at the doors. Segmental arch, door in the middle, two windows either side on the ground floor, central balcony above. That is the regulation, written in 1753 and still describing most of the fronts.

And notice the industry that is not there. La Maquinista Terrestre i Marítima arrived in 1856, made market structures, bridges, railway and marine equipment, marked the life of the district for more than a hundred years, and closed in 1963. The Ajuntament bought and demolished it in 1978 and put schools and 300 social housing units on the site.

⚠️ What we are not going to give you is a restaurant list, a beach-bar recommendation or a “best paella” claim. This is a neighbourhood where a lot of people live in small flats and a lot of businesses compete for a passing trade; our position on lists like that does not change because there is sand nearby.

Where this sits on a walk

The Barceloneta is fifteen minutes from the bottom of the Rambla, past the Drassanes and along the harbour. It is the other end of the same story as the medieval walls — the sea wall closed the city’s marine flank in the sixteenth century, and this district is what happened outside it two hundred years later.

Our Gothic Quarter walk runs Monday and Wednesday afternoons and starts at Plaça Nova; the after-dark version is Friday and Saturday nights. We are closed on 25 December and 1 January.