El Born Centre de Cultura i Memòria

Historic · La Ribera (Ciutat Vella)Barcelona,Spain

Sixty streets of the Barcelona quarter demolished after the siege of 1714, kept five metres down under an iron market roof.

El Born Centre de Cultura i Memòria is sixty streets of the city as it stood in 1714, kept under an iron market roof. Below the walkways lie the streets of the Ribera quarter: house walls, wells, drains and cellars, the floor plans still legible five metres down. You cross above them on a raised deck and look into the rooms. Nothing was built on top, and that decision took eleven years of public argument to reach. What you are looking down at was emptied on purpose. Barcelona surrendered on 11 September 1714 after a siege of more than a year in the War of the Spanish Succession. Philip V, the new king, had about a thousand houses in this quarter pulled down and their residents moved out, and a fortress went up to hold the city. Catalonia's own institutions were abolished by decree soon after. The ground was then left alone for nearly three hundred years. When the centre opened in 2013 the day chosen was 11 September, so the streets below were reopened on the anniversary of the morning they were lost. Look down from the rail and pick a doorway; somebody was told to leave it.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The free level explains very little — the walkway is open to anyone but the labelling is thin in English, so without the guided descent or a plan in hand the stones stay anonymous.
Look at the streets, not the buildings — The lanes below are as wide as the ones you walked in, which shows this is the quarter next door, not a separate ruin.
Late afternoon light comes through the sides — the iron hall is glazed high on its flanks, so the low sun reaches the excavation floor and the wall lines cast shadows that make them readable.

Things to do

1
Cross to the deepest corner first
Most people stop at the first railing. Keep going to the far end of the walkway, where the site is deepest and the street pattern is clearest. From there you can see the lanes running away in two directions and the cut edge where the excavation stops under the modern buildings outside.
2
Read one house by its water
Look along the exposed houses for a circular stone shaft and a lined channel running out of a wall. Water in and waste out, in a city block of 1714. Once you have found one pair you will see them repeated down the street, which is how you start reading the site as housing rather than as ruins.
3
Come out and pace the same distance outside
Leave by the main doors and walk into the lanes of the Born quarter behind you. The width, the turns and the block sizes are the same as the ones below the deck. The quarter you have just been looking at did not vanish; a specific part of it was removed, and the rest is still standing around you.