Mercat de Sant Antoni

Market · Sant Antoni (Eixample)Barcelona,Spain

An 1882 iron market hall on the rubble of the city gate it replaced, with a bastion, a Roman road and a bomb shelter beneath.

Mercat de Sant Antoni stands on the gate it replaced. When Barcelona's walls came down after 1854, this iron hall went up on the rubble of the Sant Antoni gate, finished in 1882 by Antoni Rovira i Trias and Josep Maria Cornet. It is shaped like a cross with an octagonal dome where the arms meet, and it fills one whole block of the new grid, with four pavilions turned to face the cut-off corners. It was drawn for the city being built around it rather than the one just demolished. A rebuild that ran for nine years dug the floor out and found what the market had been standing on. Go below the shopping level and there is a bastion of the seventeenth-century defences, ninety metres of it and five metres high, with its ditch beside it. Running alongside is a paved branch of the Roman road that came down the coast from Rome. Under both is a shelter dug in 1937 for people hiding from air raids. Three layers of the same instinct, stacked, and on a scheduled visit you can walk between them.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Sunday morning is a different market — the outer galleries fill with second-hand books, comics, coins and cards until early afternoon, and it is the busiest and most local the building gets.
The underground is not always open — the Roman road and the bastion are shown on scheduled visits with limited places; at other times you look at them through glass panels in the floor.
Stand where the four arms meet — the ironwork was designed to be read from that one point, and from anywhere else the building comes apart into four separate corridors.
The food hall and the paper market keep different days — they are separate trades sharing one building, so one of them can be at its busiest while the other is behind shutters.

Things to do

1
Come on Sunday for the paper market
The galleries around the food hall fill with trestles of second-hand books, old comics, football stickers, coins and postcards. Buyers arrive with lists. Work along one row slowly and you will find Barcelona street photographs and 1970s magazines sold by weight, and dealers who have held the same pitch for decades.
2
Stand on the glass and look down at the old bastion
Find the glass panels set into the shopping floor and stand on them. Below is the stone footing of the bastion, five metres high where it survives, running under the building. Even without the guided descent you can see how deep the market sits above the ground it was built on.
3
Circle the block by its cut corners
Take a circuit of the block along the outside of the hall. At each cut-off corner a small pavilion turns to meet the diagonal, and the pedestrianised road surface runs unbroken from pavement to pavement. It is the clearest place in the city to see how a nineteenth-century building was fitted to the grid it stands in.