The squares of Gràcia, and what each one is actually for

Gràcia has more squares per square kilometre than anywhere else in Barcelona and not one of them is grand. There is no cathedral square, no parade ground, nothing with a fountain at the centre and a statue of a man on a horse. They were built as places to meet, complain and organise, and they are still doing it.

What follows is what each one is doing, and roughly when.

Plaça de la Vila de Gràcia

The town hall square of the town Gràcia used to be, with the clock tower standing over it. On 4 April 1870 the bell in that tower was rung as an alarm during the draw for military conscription and the town rose; the army answered with artillery from Montjuïc, and the bell cracked and kept ringing. That afternoon has its own page.

Mornings it is a thoroughfare. Middle of the day it is a terrace. Evenings it is the square where things get announced — a stall, a stage, a banner across two lamp posts, a queue of people waiting to be told something.

If you only sit down in one square in Gràcia, this is the one that makes the rest of the neighbourhood legible.

Plaça de la Virreina

The photographed one. The church of Sant Joan closes one end with a stone façade and a rose window; terraces take up most of the rest; there are trees, and in the right weeks the light comes through them at an angle that has sold a lot of postcards.

It also demonstrates the pattern better than any of the others: nobody laid this out as a main square. It stayed a square because people kept using it as one, and eventually the paving caught up. That is how the whole street plan happened, and it is a story about two governments meeting at a line.

Plaça del Diamant

Small, square, unremarkable at first glance, and the one people come back from with something to say.

In one corner there is the Colometa sculpture — the heroine of Mercè Rodoreda’s novel, which takes its title from this square and which a great many Catalan readers regard as the novel about Barcelona. Underneath the square there is an air-raid shelter dug by the residents during the Civil War. It can be visited, but not on impulse: you have to book.

Two floors of the same square, the pavement and the tunnel under it, both belonging to the same years, and one of them is a piece of fiction.

Plaça del Sol

The neighbourhood’s living room, and the loudest room in the house.

Afternoon: children, dogs, prams, a football that keeps hitting the same wall. After dark: people sitting on the ground with something to drink, in numbers, for hours. It is a square without a single feature worth photographing that nevertheless has more life in it per square metre than anywhere in the Gothic Quarter.

The balconies around it are bedrooms. The relationship between those bedrooms and that noise is a live, decades-old argument in this neighbourhood, and if you are there at one in the morning you are in it whether you meant to be or not. The evening in full, and what it is not, is in Gràcia at night.

Plaça de la Revolució

A minute’s walk from Plaça del Sol and put to the same use, at a quieter volume. It is where you go when the Sol is full, which on a warm night it is.

The names, and why we have not explained them

Several of these squares are named after people, estates and events, and the versions of those origins that circulate online contradict each other. We have left them out rather than repeat one we cannot check. The dates in this piece — 1870, the Civil War shelter, the novel — are the ones we are prepared to stand behind.

Under this square there is a Civil War air-raid shelter: sixty-nine metres of gallery, reached down zigzag stairs dropping twelve and a half metres, dug by neighbours — one of the 1,322 the city has inventoried.

Where the squares sit in the walk

In order, on foot, they are stops 4, 6, 7 and 8 of what to see in Gràcia, which is the route that avoids repeating a street. Stop 5 is the factory chimney, which is not a square and is worth the detour anyway. Whether the neighbourhood is worth the half day at all is argued out in is Gràcia worth visiting.

Our Gràcia walking tour works through them with somebody telling you who used them and why, which is a different way of finding out what a square is for. It ends in a celler with vermouth from the barrel, which is the other way.

Twenty-one squares against three passatges is the ratio the register gives, and the passatges are almost all somewhere else: where they actually are, and who owned the ground.