Barcelona Cathedral's lacy, pinnacled west front is barely a century old. It was paid for in the late 1880s and finished in 1913, worked up from a medieval design the church had never been able to afford. The church behind that front is far older: a broad Catalan Gothic building begun in 1298 and finished, cloister and all, by the middle of the next century. It stands on the site of an earlier Romanesque cathedral, and Roman stone lies deeper still. The side aisles climb almost to the height of the nave, so the inside feels like one wide dim hall rather than a tall narrow one. It is dedicated to the Holy Cross and to Saint Eulàlia, a girl martyred at thirteen, whose alabaster sarcophagus lies in the crypt below the high altar.
Most visitors remember the cloister instead. Palms and orange trees fill a courtyard where thirteen white geese, one for each year of Eulàlia's life, sleep and squabble beside a mossy Gothic fountain, ringed by chapels that medieval guilds paid to build. It is still the archbishop's working seat, and the old customs are still kept: an eggshell dances on the fountain's jet at Corpus Christi, and a Christmas fair has filled the square since the 1780s.