The Council of a Hundred had a hundred members for about ninety years, and kept the name for another four centuries

Stand in the middle of Plaça de Sant Jaume and you are between two governments. The Ajuntament de Barcelona on one side, the Generalitat de Catalunya on the other, about forty metres apart, both with balconies pointed at the same paving.

It is the most photographed civic space in the city and almost everything people assume about it is wrong, starting with its age.

The square is from the 1840s

This is the part that surprises everybody, including people who live here.

The Ajuntament’s own street register is clear about what was here before: a crossroads. Specifically, the intersection of the two axes that crossed the city north–south and east–west — Llibreteria–Escrivanies–Call one way, Bisbe–Ciutat–Regomir the other. The Roman grid, still legible in the street names.

There was a church of Sant Jaume, established in 1057, facing the junction by 1261. In the fourteenth century a porch was added to it, and the register notes what the porch was for: it was where the councillors of the city gathered when they had to attend a public act as a body. A covered assembly point for the municipal government, outside a church, on a corner.

Then in 1823 the council decided to knock the church down, along with the buildings attached to it, to form a great square, the present one. It opened in 1840, under the name plaça de la Constitució.

So the open square in front of the two oldest institutions in Catalonia is younger than the demolition of the city walls and roughly contemporary with Barcelona’s first railway. It is the same operation as Plaça de Sant Felip Neri and everything else in the Gothic Quarter that reads as medieval and is not: the buildings are old, the space between them was cleared later.

⚠️ And the register contradicts itself in one paragraph. Its present form dates from 1841, says the first line. It opened in 1840, says the last. One year apart, same entry, same institution. We use both and choose neither.

Five names since 1820

The register also keeps the list of what this square has been called, and it is a political history of Spain in six lines:

• San Jaime — before 1820
• Constitución — before 1865
• República — 24 April 1931
• Constitución — 7 March 1939
• Sant Jaume — 20 July 1940

Read the two 1939 and 1940 entries together. The square was renamed Constitución six weeks before the end of the Civil War, and then renamed again sixteen months later. Whoever was renaming things had time to change their mind twice.

Neither building shows you its front door

The Casa de la Ciutat. The façade you photograph from the square is nineteenth-century, put up when the square was made. Walk round the corner into the Carrer de la Ciutat and you find what the register calls the old main façade of the city hall, dated 1399–1402, by the master builder Arnau Bargués with the sculptors Jordi Joan and Pere Sanglada.

It takes forty seconds. Almost nobody does it, and it is the single best piece of civic Gothic in Barcelona that has no queue in front of it.

The Palau de la Generalitat. Same trick, other side. The grand Renaissance front on the square was begun in 1597 by Pere Blai — the encyclopaedia calls it one of the principal Catalan Renaissance monuments, in the tradition of the Italian palaces — and the Sant Jordi on it is by Andreu Aleu, 1866.

The old entrance is on the Carrer del Bisbe, and it was the door of the orchard. Marc Safont’s work, with a Sant Jordi medallion by Pere Joan, 1418, above it. The palace grew towards the square rather than facing it: the register records that in 1598 it was resolved to enlarge the palace as far as the little square by the church porch.

Inside, on the other side of that wall, is the courtyard the encyclopaedia calls one of the best Catalan Gothic courtyards, 1425, with Safont’s chapel of Sant Jordi off its gallery — and the Pati dels Tarongers, the orange-tree courtyard that marks the shift to the Renaissance, with classical porches by Gil de Medina, 1537–47.

⚠️ The chapel’s dates are a mess in one page. The text says 1432–34. The caption under the page’s own photograph says 1432–35. And the same sentence then says it was finished in 1535, a century later. We are reporting all three rather than picking the tidy one.

The Council of a Hundred was not a hundred

Inside the Casa de la Ciutat is the Saló de Cent, built in 1371. Before it existed, the assembly met first in the Dominican convent and then in the Franciscan one — the city government had no hall of its own for over a century after the council was created.

And then the number. The encyclopaedia’s account:

• 1258 — Jaume I limits the assembly to two hundred prohoms
• 1265 — reduced to one hundred, a form that lasted a long time and gave the institution its name
• fourteenth century — the number oscillates between eighty and two hundred and six
• 1455 — fixed at one hundred and twenty-eight, thirty-two from each estate

It was a hundred for about ninety years and then never again, and it went on being called the Council of a Hundred until 1714, when it was abolished by the decree of Nova Planta.

That is nearly four centuries of an institution named after a number it did not have. There is no better one-sentence description of how this city labels itself, and it is the same mechanism as the Gothic Quarter’s own name and the guild street names the register itself warns you about.

Two more details from the same entry, both good. The meeting hour was apparently not fixed until 1637 — for two hundred and sixty years the councillors turned up when they turned up. And because getting a hundred-odd men into a room was difficult, they had to invent a smaller standing council, the Trentenari. Every committee in the world has been reinvented since.

The murals somebody painted over

The Sala de Sant Jordi, behind Pere Blai’s façade, holds the best story in either building.

The Mancomunitat commissioned Joaquim Torres-García to paint the room, and he did, between 1913 and 1918, in the noucentista manner: Mediterranean, classical, deliberately Catalan.

Then, in the encyclopaedia’s own words, the politicians of the Dictatorship covered them with pompier murals in order to hide the noucentista ones.

They are not lost. The originals are today preserved in other rooms of the palace.

A government painted over the murals of a previous government, and both sets survive in the same building — one on the wall of the ceremonial hall, one moved elsewhere. If you want a single object that explains twentieth-century Catalonia to a visitor, it is a room with two layers of paint.

The bridge, and the street that dropped a number

The famous neo-Gothic bridge over the Carrer del Bisbe is Joan Rubió i Bellver, 1928, and the encyclopaedia is precise about what it joins: the palace and the Casa dels Canonges across the street. It has its own page, including who actually commissioned it, because that is one of the things we have had to correct.

And one street sign worth stopping at. The Carrer de Ferran, running down towards the Rambla, was dedicated to Ferran VII when it was opened, for his visit to the city. On 1 March 1910 the council resolved to change the name from Ferran VII to plain Ferran — a change, the register says with some satisfaction, that made the street stop honouring the absolutist king.

They did not rename it. They deleted a numeral, and let everyone go on saying the same word.

Walking it

The order that works, and it takes twenty minutes: the square first, from the middle, so you can see both balconies; then Carrer de la Ciutat for the 1399 façade; then Carrer del Bisbe for the orchard door, the 1418 medallion and the bridge; then down Carrer de Ferran.

You will pass the squares of the old city on the way, and if you keep going you reach what La Rambla actually is, which is a boundary rather than a destination.

Our Gothic Quarter walk starts up at Plaça Nova and comes through here on Monday and Wednesday afternoons; the after-dark version does it on Friday and Saturday nights, when the two façades are lit and there is nobody standing between them. We are closed on 25 December and 1 January.

If you want the full walkable order for the neighbourhood, it is here.