In one of these squares you can still swear a will out loud, under a procedure from the eleventh century

Everyone photographs the same two squares in this neighbourhood: the one with the bridge over it and the one with the bombed church. Both are worth it and both are covered elsewhere on this site.

These four are not. One of them contains something that is not preserved but still in force.

Plaça de Sant Just — where wills are still sworn

Start with the fact, because it is the best one in the neighbourhood.

A sacramental will — testament sacramental — is a form of will available, in the Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana’s description, to people holding local residency of Barcelona or of the old bishopric of Girona. You make it while travelling away from home, spoken or written, before at least two witnesses. For it to be valid, you have to die during the journey, and the witnesses must, within six months, swear to it under oath before the rector of the church where such wills are customarily sworn. It then goes to a court of first instance to be protocolised.

That is not a historical curiosity. It is a live provision of Catalan civil law, and it points at a physical address.

The church is Sants Just i Pastor, on this square. The encyclopaedia is specific about where inside it: the altar of the chapel of Sant Feliu i Santa Creu, under a retable painted in 1532 — sobre l’altar d’aquesta capella es juren els testaments sacramentals de Barcelona, segons costum dels segles X i XI, recopilat el 1283 en el Recognoverunt proceres de Pere II.

A custom of the tenth and eleventh centuries, codified in 1283, with an address and a piece of furniture. Everything else in this neighbourhood is a thing that used to happen.

How old the church is, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of claim this journal is careful with. The Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana says that segons tradició it is the oldest church in the city — flagged as tradition, not as record. What is documented is that in 965 it was given to the cathedral and was already functioning as a parish, with the royal palace and many of the city’s noble houses in its territory.

The parish itself makes a different and more careful claim than the one people repeat on its behalf. It does not say “oldest parish”. It says there has been uninterrupted Catholic worship here des del segle VI i molt probablement des del segle IV, that the church sits on the mont Justi, a promontory fourteen metres above sea level where a Roman temple or sacellum stood, and that the archaeology dates a Visigothic episcopal complex here to the sixth century.

The present building is Gothic and late: begun 1345 by the Generalitat’s and the encyclopaedia’s reckoning — the parish says 1342 — and both call it la darrera de les grans esglésies gòtiques de Barcelona, the last of the great Gothic churches of Barcelona.

The fountain, and a small confession. You will be told the fountain in this square is the oldest working fountain in Barcelona and dates from 1367. We could not verify either half. The Generalitat’s file describes it — a solid rectangular stone plane with a classicising frontispiece, a figure of Sant Just at the centre, shields at the ends, una obra medieval en quant a construcció amb elements classicistes — and gives no date and no superlative. So we are not printing one.

One last thing worth knowing before you correct anybody: the square’s official name is Plaça de Sant Just, not Sant Just i Pastor. The double dedication belongs to the church.

Plaça del Pi and Plaça de Sant Josep Oriol — the market square that was a graveyard

Two squares, one church between them, and the interesting name is on the quieter one.

Plaça de Sant Josep Oriol, the leafy side where people sit, appears in the Ajuntament’s street register with its earlier names attached. The oldest is Fossar del Pi — the burial ground of the Pi. Before it was a place to have a beer under the trees it was the parish graveyard, and the register also records that the saint’s name is a late arrival: Beato Oriol, approved on 2 April 1816.

The church is documented on this site from 987, as the centre of a district outside the walls — which is the thing to hold on to, because today it feels like the middle of the old city and it was originally a suburb. Construction of the present building was agreed in 1303 and had begun by 1306; the parish prefers around 1320. The last stone was laid in 1391, and the bell tower, begun about 1379, was not finished until 1463.

The rose window is the reason people stop, and the parish does something admirable with it.

On one page of its own website it says the rose window is la més gran del món — the largest in the world. On another page it takes that back, in public:

Tant celebrada era a Barcelona que sovint se l’havia considerat la més gran del món. En realitat és, juntament amb la de la catedral de Tarragona amb la que rivalitza per pocs centímetres, la més gran de Catalunya i probablement de l’Espanya peninsular.

An institution correcting its own legend on its own site is rare enough that it deserves to be quoted rather than quietly used. Its catalogue gives the diameter as ten metres, the tracery as derived from the rose of Notre-Dame in Paris, and the subject as the vision of the throne of God from the Apocalypse of Saint John, with the twelve tribes of Israel in the inner rays and the twenty-four elders in the outer ones.

And the object itself is not the medieval one. The original was lost in 1936 — the parish dates the fire to 20 June of that year, which is a month before the rising, and no other institutional source we found either confirms or corrects that date, so treat the day as theirs. The window was rebuilt after the war, the parish says faithfully, by Josep Maria Jujol — Gaudí’s collaborator, and the man the architects’ register credits with the fountain in Plaça d’Espanya.

One thing to look at that nobody points out: the city’s archaeological record notes that a Roman inscription of the first or second century, dedicated to Quintus Calpurnius, was found reused as the foundation of the left pillar of the doorway. A tombstone from Barcino holding up a Gothic door.

Plaça de Sant Jaume — the Roman forum with a nineteenth-century square on it

This is the one people find disappointing, and it is the one that most repays knowing what happened.

Underneath you is the forum of Barcino, at the crossing of the two main streets of the Roman colony — the decumanus being today’s Carrer del Bisbe and Carrer de la Ciutat, the cardo being Call and Llibreteria. That crossing is the reason the city hall and the Catalan government are here and not somewhere else.

But the open rectangle is modern. The city’s archaeological record describes what was here before: a small crossroads, which already existed in 1261, with the church of Sant Jaume — established in 1057 — facing onto it, and a fourteenth-century porch where the city’s councillors gathered before public acts. In 1598 the Palau de la Generalitat was enlarged up to the little square in front of that porch.

Then:

L’any 1823 acordà l’Ajuntament enderrocar l’església i altres edificis annexos per formar una gran plaça, l’actual, que s’obrí el 1840 amb el nom de plaça de la Constitució.

A church demolished to make a public space. The same record opens by saying the square’s present form dates from 1841; it closes with 1840. Both sentences are on the same page.

The two façades facing each other are also not what they look like. The neoclassical front of the city hall was built for the new square by Josep Mas i Vila — dated 1832-44 by the Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana in one entry, 1831-1850 in another entry of the same encyclopaedia, and 1831-1844 by the Generalitat. Three ranges, two of them from the same publisher.

The Gothic façade is round the corner, on Carrer de la Ciutat, and it is the older building’s real face: commissioned to the master builder Arnau Bargués in 1399, with the shields finished in 1400 and a sculpture in 1401. Which saint that sculpture is depends on who you ask — the Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana says the archangel Saint Raphael; the Generalitat’s heritage file says Saint Andrew. Go and look, and do not take anyone’s word for it, including ours.

And there is a coda that says everything about this square. The same architect who built the neoclassical front also, in 1852, tried to have the Gothic façade demolished. The encyclopaedia’s phrasing is unimprovable: l’intent — venturosament fallit — de fer enderrocar la façana gòtica del carrer de la Ciutat. The attempt, happily failed.

The square’s name has changed with every regime, and the register keeps the list: Sant Jaume before 1820, Constitució before 1865, República from 24 April 1931, Constitución again from 7 March 1939, and Sant Jaume again from 20 July 1940.

Plaça de la Vila de Madrid — the Roman dead under the car park

Five minutes north-west, off the top of La Rambla, there is a sunken rectangle with rows of stone tombs in it and offices all around.

It is a Roman funerary road. Burials could not be inside the walls, so they lined the roads going out, and this was one of them. The MUHBA dates the burial area to between the first and third centuries; the city’s own archaeological record extends it to the fourth — two services of the same council, two answers, the museum’s being the simplified one.

What preserved it was mud: the museum notes it was gradually buried by deposits from a watercourse, which is why it survived at all.

Then it was built over. In 1588 the convent of Santa Teresa of the discalced Carmelites — a community of seven nuns — went up on part of the site. The convent was badly damaged in the Civil War, and in 1944 the city decided to reorganise the whole area. In March 1954, digging foundations for the new houses around the square, the workers hit the tombs. Agustí Duran i Sanpere — the same man who saved the Gegants del Pi from the church fires and who ran the Jewish necropolis excavation on Montjuïc — and the team of the city’s historical archive read it as a monumental group along a road out of the city. Work continued in 1956 and 1957.

How many graves? Nobody publishes a total, and we are not going to invent one. The only municipal figure is partial and belongs to a later dig: at least 66 individuals — seven cremations, forty-seven inhumations — inside a single funerary enclosure of about 8.85 by 5 metres, in tombs of half a dozen types, from cremation urns to amphora burials.

If you want one number for the whole necropolis, it does not exist in the public record.

Walking the four

They are all within about ten minutes of one another and none of them takes long.

The sequence that works: Sant Jaume first, because it explains the street plan you are about to walk through; then down Carrer de la Ciutat to see the Gothic façade the neoclassicist tried to knock down; then Sant Just, two minutes away and almost always empty; then across to Plaça del Pi and Sant Josep Oriol for the rose window and somewhere to sit; and finally out to Vila de Madrid, which is on the way to La Rambla anyway.

Add Sant Felip Neri, which is a different kind of visit and belongs on its own, and Plaça del Rei, which is the city history museum’s founding site.

The rest of the neighbourhood in a walkable order is what to see in the Gothic Quarter; what is genuinely Roman under all of it is Roman Barcelona, what survives; and the streets between these squares are named after the trades that worked them, with a caveat from the city itself, in the guild streets.

Our Gothic Quarter walk uses three of these four, told by an actor rather than recited, and spends two hours on what is genuinely old here and what was assembled later. The after-dark version does the same squares with nobody in them, which changes Sant Just completely.