Mercat de Santa Caterina

Market · Sant Pere (Ciutat Vella)Barcelona,Spain

A working Barcelona food market under a wave of 325,000 coloured ceramic hexagons, with a burnt convent's foundations kept at the back.

Mercat de Santa Caterina is roofed with 325,000 hand-made ceramic hexagons in sixty-seven colours, laid in a wave that rises and drops across the whole building. From the doors you cannot see any of it. The roof only reads from a balcony or from the far side of the avenue, and from there the pattern turns out to be a spilled heap of fruit and vegetables. Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue designed it, and the tiles were fired at Granollers, each one fourteen and a half centimetres across. It went on in 2005, a hundred and sixty years after the hall underneath opened as the first covered market in Barcelona. Rebuilding opened the ground: a Dominican convent stood here from the thirteenth century until crowds burnt it in 1835, and its foundations are now kept visible at the back of the hall. The trade is ordinary, and that is the point — fishmongers, butchers, a queue of people buying dinner. Mornings from Monday to Saturday are the market; arrive in the late afternoon and you get a remarkable roof over a hall of closed shutters.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Half an hour is enough — the hall is one open room and the excavation is a single glazed floor at the back, so this works as a stop on the way somewhere rather than as a destination.
These counters are for cooks — this is a neighbourhood food market rather than a row of tapas bars, so the interest is in what people are buying, not in eating standing up.
The convent is at the back — the excavated foundations sit behind glass at the rear of the hall, free to walk up to, and nothing in the market points you towards them.

Things to do

1
Get above the roof and let it separate
Walk into the streets north of the market and work your way to any higher vantage: an open stairwell, a raised terrace, the upper end of Avinguda de Francesc Cambo. From above the roof stops being a coloured blur and separates into individual hexagons, and the run of oranges, greens and reds resolves into produce spilled across the surface.
2
Look down through the floor at the convent
Go to the back wall of the hall and look down through the floor panels. Below are the stone footings of the convent church and its cloister, cut off at ankle height, with the market's own service pipes running past them. Nobody has tidied the two apart, and the layering is the whole point.
3
Watch a fish counter at eight in the morning
Come early and stand back from one of the fish stalls. The boxes are being emptied, the ice is being raked flat, and the first customers are older residents who are known by name. Within two hours the same counter is half sold out, which tells you what this market is actually for.