The hill is named after a cemetery, and 529 of its graves are still down there unopened

Halfway up the north-eastern slope, between the Olympic shooting ranges and the Joan Brossa gardens, there is a fenced field at about a hundred metres above sea level.

You cannot go in. It was covered back over with earth to protect what is under it. And what is under it is the reason the hill has the name it has.

First, a correction to our own pages

We have been writing on this site that the name of Montjuïc is unresolved — that mount of the Jews and the Latin Mons Iovis are two readings with serious defenders, and that anyone who picks one has decided something the evidence has not.

That was wrong, and we are taking it down.

Six institutional sources address it, and all six settle it the same way.

The Generalitat’s listing decree — a legal instrument, not a leaflet — says the old Jewish cemetery dóna nom a la muntanya de Montjuïc. The Ajuntament’s own castle interpretation centre says el nom de Montjuïc prové del cementiri jueu que hi va existir fins al 1391. The MUHBA calls the hill el mont dels Jueus in its Call route, and la «muntanya dels jueus» in its leaflet. The Generalitat’s tourism directorate says the name literalment significa muntanya de jueus.

And the Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana, the only one of the six that mentions Jupiter at all, mentions him to close the argument: earlier writers argued at length for a Mons Iovis, mentre que la documentació referent a la muntanya, conservada des del 878, l’anomena invariablement Mons Judaicus o in Monte Judaico.

Documents from 878, invariably. That is not an open question; that is an old question with an answer, and we had been repeating the version where it stays open because it makes a better opening line. It does not survive the sources, so it goes.

What is in the ground

Two campaigns, fifty-five years apart, and the arithmetic is the point.

October 1945 to April 1946. Building work for the Tiro al Pichón shooting facility tore into the burial ground. The Institut Municipal d’Història, under Agustí Duran i Sanpere, excavated what was exposed and uncovered 171 tombs — 114 inhumations, 90 of adults and 24 of children — along with grave goods.

October 2001 to February 2002. The city’s archaeology service ran a campaign to delimit the necropolis and located 557 more tombs, most of them intact. Of those 557 it was able to excavate 28. None of the 28 contained any grave goods, unlike 1946.

So: 728 graves located, 199 ever opened. Five hundred and twenty-nine documented burials are still down there, undisturbed, under a fenced field with grass on it.

No institution publishes 728 as a single figure, and we think that is deliberate. Adding them up flattens the distinction between a grave that was excavated and a grave that was found and left alone, and the second number is the one that describes this place today.

The city stopped digging, on purpose

This is the part that makes the site unusual, and the city says it plainly.

The archaeology service’s own account describes the necropolis as having gone from total neglect to being objecte de les controvèrsies més apassionades, and names both obstacles: the cost, and les reticències i l’oposició d’algunes de les comunitats jueves del país i de més enllà de les nostres fronteres.

The practical consequence is stated as a method: archaeological work here se cenyeix a treballs de prospecció i delimitació de la necròpolis i, en cap cas, a l’excavació en extensió. Prospection and delimitation, and in no case excavation in extension.

That is why the last significant intervention, in June and July 2014, was geophysical prospection in the Joan Brossa gardens — reading the ground with instruments rather than opening it, and finding indications of burials matching the types recorded in 1946 and 2001.

The same document notes what that costs the researchers: the constraints make anthropological study, and the extraction of bone for radiocarbon dating, extremely difficult. Three datings exist. They put the burials between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.

A city that decided not to excavate a site and then published why is doing something more interesting than digging it.

One stone with a date on it

In 2001, on tomb UF 423, a limestone block was found still in place — 0.47 by 1.43 by 0.37 metres, with a funerary inscription and a year.

The reading published by the city:

This is the tomb of a pious and honest woman, the lady Míriam, wife of Rabbi Isaac bar Leví, blessed be the memory of the just. She died in the month of Kislev of the year four thousand nine hundred and ninety.

1229.

The wider epigraphic corpus from this cemetery runs to more than 74 units, gathered in the Series Hebraica of the Monumenta Paleographica Medii Aevi.

One caution if you go reading further. The Ajuntament’s own castle page gives this grave as tomb 435 and dates the first excavation to 1949; the legal declaration and the archaeology service both say 423 and 1945–46. The castle page is the outlier on both counts and we are following the other two.

How old the cemetery is

Older than the stones that survive.

The first notices go back to 1091, and the phrase used matters: the documents speak of old Jewish graves, which implies a burial ground already established. The city’s archaeologists reason from that to at least the tenth century.

And there is a wonderful piece of indirect evidence from 1388. The Jewish community of Tortosa, arguing to protect their own cemetery from having its stones taken, made the case that their graves were notable — but not as notable as those of Barcelona, which were five hundred years old. Which would put the Barcelona burial ground in the ninth century, the same century as those Mons Judaicus documents.

The Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana adds a complication almost nobody carries: there were two Jewish cemeteries on this mountain. An older one on the western flank, where the south-western municipal cemetery now stands, from which gravestones were removed — especially in 1880 — and a newer one, in use at least from the thirteenth century until 1391, which is the one excavated in 1945–46.

1391, and where the stones went

After the assault on the Call in August 1391, the cemetery passed to the crown.

In 1393 it was, apparently, sold — per 2.450 florins — to a company of the Jews’ creditors. The city’s archaeology service is careful here: that sale mai no es va fer efectiva. The sale never took effect. What did happen was the mass extraction of stone from the burial ground, and it continued until 1401.

The stones went into buildings. Inscribed blocks from the necropolis are recorded by the city in the Palau de la Generalitat, the Palau del Lloctinent and houses on Carrer de Montcada, and the MUHBA’s route leaflet is specific about where to look: the façades of the Palau del Lloctinent giving onto Plaça de Sant Iu and Plaça del Rei.

Which is why this is a page about Montjuïc that ends in the Gothic Quarter. You can stand in a square most visitors cross without stopping and look at Hebrew letters in a wall, ten minutes’ walk from the buildings that were moved.

And a disagreement about that same wall

Two official publications, both distributed by the MUHBA, give two different origins for the same stones.

The museum’s own Call leaflet: the inscribed blocks in the Palau del Lloctinent procedeixen de la necròpolis jueva de Montjuïc.

The Generalitat’s Jewish-heritage guide, which the museum publishes alongside it: the Hebrew fragments in Plaça de Sant Iu come del cementiri de Montjuïc del Bisbe (plaça de sant Felip Neri) — a different burial ground entirely, inside the old city, nothing to do with the mountain.

The archaeology service’s academic account sides with the mountain, without naming Sant Iu. Two to one, and still a live contradiction in print.

The safe formulation, and the one we use, is that the stones come from Barcelona’s medieval Jewish cemeteries — and that two official publications on the same shelf name different ones.

What you can actually see

Not the site. It is fenced, buried and closed.

MUHBA El Call, in the old Jewish quarter, displays làpides provinents del fossar jueu de Montjuïc alongside columns from the Banys Nous. It is a very small museum and it is the only place you will see these stones as objects rather than as masonry.

Plaça del Rei and Plaça de Sant Iu, free, at any hour: the reused blocks in the wall.

The Marlet stone, on the corner of Carrer de Marlet, is not from the cemetery — the museum identifies it as the foundation stone of Samuel ha-Sardí’s heqdés, and notes that the one in the wall is a copy of an original the museum holds. It gets attributed to the necropolis constantly.

And one gravestone came back recently. In March 2021 a resident reported a stone on Avinguda de Miramar; it turned out to be a slab of Montjuïc stone, 1.46 by 0.60 metres, with a legible inscription — in this tomb is buried the distinguished Rabbi David, son of Rabbi… — most likely thrown down the hillside when the shooting range or the first amusement park was built. It is now in the museum’s conservation centre.

Somebody walking past noticed a rock. That is how one of these came home.

Why we put this on a walking-tour site

Because the hill is usually introduced by its castle, its museums and its view, and its name is older than all three.

The castle is seventeenth-century. The quarries that built the old city ran for two thousand years. The 1929 fairground is a century old. The municipal cemetery opened in 1883. The burial ground that gave the hill its name was there before any of them and is the only thing up there you are not allowed to visit.

Our Montjuïc walking tour works the fairground, the castle and the quarry behind it, told by an actor rather than recited. Whether the hill earns your afternoon is is Montjuïc worth it — a page we have just had to correct because of what is on this one.