Passeig de Gràcia

The Passeig de Gràcia is a wide Barcelona street that is the main thoroughfare of Barcelona’s Eixample district, and probably the number-one shopping destination in the city. The romantically-inclined might interpret its name as “passage of grace”, or “passage to grace”, a promise that any street would have difficulty fulfilling, but the origin of the name is actually much more literal and mundane. The original purpose of the road was to connect old Barcelona, at the time contained within a city wall, with the nearby community of Gràcia (named after its convent, Nostra Senyora de Gràcia). The road ran through open space, and wasn’t nearly so grand. But during the 19th Century, Barcelona was bursting at its seams and ended up spilling over its wall into the surrounding countryside. The Passeig de Gràcia was expanded, and the area around it became a planned district called the Eixample (“extension”). The community of Gràcia was finally enveloped and ingested by Barcelona, becoming another district thereof.

With all the development going on, the Eixample in general, and the Passeig de Gràcia in particular, became fertile ground for modernista architects in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. And Gaudí (often lumped in with the modernistas, but not really one stylistically – apparently modernisme had a set of rules, and Gaudí pretty much made up his own), who contributed La Pedrera near the north end of the road (and the Sagrada Família, in a different part of the district).

At its south end, the Passeig de Gràcia spills into the Plaça de Catalunya, which (you may recall) lies at the head of La Rambla, reasonably close to our hotel. On exiting from La Pedrera, we decided to walk the length of Passeig de Gràcia, which stretches for about a mile, to look at the buildings. We passed many designer stores but didn’t visit any (I find them to be silly places with absurdly elevated prices; Nella may have a different opinion). Many of the buildings were practical but nondescript 20th Century structures, but occasionally we ran into something that grabbed our attention.

Passeig Balconies
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A small concentration of such buildings occupies a block known as the Illa de la Discòrdia (“block of discord”), named for the experimentally-architected structures on the block which clash with each other and with everything else in the area.

Two such buildings are next door to each other. The first, which is impossible to miss, is called Casa Batlló. It was designed by Antoni Gaudí, again assisted by Josep Maria Jujol. It was built before La Pedrera, between 1904 and 1906, and seems to have previewed some of the elements that found their way into the apartment house. It looks like there are some structural similarities, and Jujol’s color ideas are on display on the façade of this building. This makes for a structure that we found impossible to ignore.

Casa Batlló Med Lrg Xlg	Roof, Casa Batlló Med Lrg Xlg
Casa Batlló Med Lrg Xlg	Façade, Casa Batlló Med Lrg Xlg

Casa Batlló
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After taking some pictures we moved on, as there was a line of people waiting to get into Casa Batlló, and it looked like it would be moving exceptionally slowly. To learn more about Casa Batlló, you can visit their official website.

Line, Casa Batlló
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Next door to Casa Batlló is a building called Casa Amatller, designed by Josep Puig i Cadafalch and built between 1898 and 1900. It’s a beautiful building, but one can see it has a lot more in common with Art Nouveau than with Gaudí. If this building were located anywhere else, it too would be difficult to ignore, but one can’t help but suspect that the pure craziness of its neighbor could cause some to overlook it.

Casa Amatller Med Lrg Xlg	Casa Amatller Med Lrg Xlg
Balconies, Casa Amatller Med Lrg Xlg	Windows, Casa Amatller Med Lrg Xlg

We continued down Passeig de Gràcia, photographing some of the distinctive buildings.

Casa Lleó Morera (Lluís Domènech i Montaner, 1902-06) Med Lrg Xlg	Casa Malagrida (Joaquim Codina Matalí, 1905-08) Med Lrg Xlg
Casa Rocamora (Bonaventura and Joaquim Basegoda, 1920) Med Lrg Xlg	Casa Rocamora Med Lrg Xlg

Eventually we came across a big concrete thing that looked like a bomb shelter, and knew we had arrived at the El Corte Inglés store on Plaça de Catalunya. We walked through the square, looking at the fountains and sculptures found there.

El Corte Inglés, Plaça de Catalunya
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Fountain and Other El Corte Inglés Building
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A brief search brought us to the head of La Rambla, and we returned to our hotel to rest up for our next adventure, a visit to the castle on the Montjuïc hill.