Plaça del Rei and Roman Barcino (MUHBA)

Historic · Barri Gòtic (Ciutat Vella)Barcelona,Spain

The one Barcelona square where Roman streets are walked at their own level, a laundry, winery and fish-sauce works under the count-kings' palace.

Plaça del Rei is the one place in Barcelona where you walk Roman streets at their own level. About four thousand square metres of Barcino lie under the square, and what is laid open down there is not a temple but a working quarter. A laundry has its stone vats sunk into the floor, and beside it are the pressing floor of a winery and the salting tanks of a workshop that made garum, the fermented fish sauce the empire ate. Come back up the stairs and you are in a courtyard rather than a square. The buildings around it are the palace of the count-kings, who were counts of Barcelona and kings of Aragon at the same time. The Saló del Tinell opens off it: one room thirty-four metres long, built between 1359 and 1370, its flat timber ceiling carried on six stone arches spanning more than sixteen metres. The wide flight of steps in the corner is the piece everyone photographs. Tradition puts Ferdinand and Isabella on them, receiving Columbus in 1493, and no document says so. Sit on them anyway: the steps are medieval whether or not the scene happened on them.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The best refuge in the city in August — the underground circuit holds the same temperature all year and takes over an hour, so it works as the middle of a hot day rather than an add-on.
The door is not on the square — the way in is through Casa Padellas on the corner of Carrer del Veguer, and people regularly circle the square looking for an entrance that is not there.
The layers are not stacked in order — the walkway crosses Roman workshops, a late antique church and medieval foundations within a few steps, so watch the floor markers or the centuries run together.
The free afternoons are the crowded ones — Sunday from mid-afternoon and the first Sunday of each month cost nothing and fill the narrow walkways below, where two people cannot pass.

Things to do

1
Read the winery floor as a machine
In the winery, find the shallow channels cut into the floor and follow them to the sunk jars. Everything tilts one way, because the pressed juice had to run downhill on its own. It is the clearest thing down here: a floor built as a machine, still doing visibly what it was shaped to do.
2
Put a hand on the Roman wall
At the far end of the underground route the circuit runs against the inside of the late Roman wall, four metres thick at the base, with a tower still standing to its full height. You can touch the stone. Above ground the same wall carries flats and shops built straight onto it.
3
Sit on the steps in the Tinell hall
Come up into the Salo del Tinell and take one of the stone benches at the side. Look along the six arches until you notice there is no column under the middle of the room. A medieval hall this wide with a flat ceiling is rare, and the arches are doing all the work overhead.
4
Come up into the square and compare
After the underground circuit, go back out and stand in the middle of Placa del Rei. The ground you are on is five or six metres above the streets you have just walked. Nothing marks the difference. That gap, filled in over fifteen centuries of rubbish, fire and rebuilding, is the whole argument of the site.