Metravel city quest
City Barcelona: free walking route “quest: the Gothic Quarter and El Born” along the sights. 10 points. Approximately 2 h 40 min. Quests and legends - straight
Barcelona has a habit: it never completely demolishes the past. It simply builds something new on top, and seven or eight centuries later, an entire street turns up beneath market stalls, or a gravestone is found in a house wall, written in a language nobody has spoken here for ages.
It all began around 15 BC, when the Romans founded the military camp of Barcino on this hill and surrounded it with a wall. Ever since, the city has added rings: Roman, Gothic, medieval Jewish, Baroque, and after 1714 an entirely new one built over a whole demolished neighbourhood. Today you will walk through these rings one after another: from La Rambla's market stalls through the Gothic Quarter's lanes, past a square where legend says Columbus was welcomed, a bridge bearing an architect's curse and a church built without a single noble, solely by dockworkers' hands, to El Born, where an entire buried city lies beneath an old market's glass roof.
What to do: 1) Read the story and task at each stop. 2) Find the place on the map and walk to it. 3) Look around: the answer is always written on the city itself, rather than in a guidebook.
This walking route is about two and a half kilometres long, entirely along the old city's pedestrian streets. We start on La Rambla at La Boqueria market, beneath a wrought-iron arch from the early last century. Thousands of Barcelona residents pass it daily without looking up. You look up. Let's go!
The route points in order — what these places are and why they are interesting. Tasks and answers stay inside the quest.
La Rambla begins as a boulevard for strolling and ends in market stalls: the first layer of today's story begins right here. Trade on this site is known from 1217, when tables were set up outside the old city gates to sell meat.
From the market, turn into the Gothic Quarter's maze and head east without lingering on side turns. In ten to fifteen minutes, the lanes will lead you onto the cathedral square.
Leave the cathedral courtyard onto Carrer del Bisbe and immediately turn into one of the narrow passages on the left towards Baixada de Santa Eulàlia. After a couple of turns, you will reach a little quiet square with a fountain and plane trees.
From Plaça de Sant Felip Neri, head down into the tangled lanes to the south. They are physically tighter here, the houses lower and older.
Leave El Call's tight lanes to the east, towards the quarter's largest and busiest square.
From Plaça de Sant Jaume, head back north along Carrer del Bisbe. After fifty metres, the street ducks beneath an ornate stone bridge spanning two buildings right above your head.
Return to Carrer del Bisbe and go a little further north to Plaça Nova beside the cathedral. Turn from there into Carrer del Veguer, which leads to a square enclosed on every side, one of the quarter's most cinematic places.
An optional stop: from Plaça del Rei, streets lead northeast to Carrer de Montcada, lined with Gothic mansions of medieval merchants. Five such mansions, joined into one complex, have held the Picasso Museum since 1963.
Go south down Carrer de Montcada to the square with the purest, most restrained Gothic façade in all Barcelona. Santa Maria del Mar took just fifty-four years to build, from 1329 to 1383, making it one of Europe's most stylistically unified large Gothic buildings, since it was barely remodelled later.
From the basilica, emerge onto broad Passeig del Born, once medieval Barcelona's main tournament and fairground square, today one of the quarter's liveliest boulevards. At its end stands an iron-and-glass building from 1876, the city's first covered market of this kind and Europe's largest when built.
This route is part of Metravel city quests. Below are the other quests in this city and cities with quests nearby.