Plaça Reial

Street · Barri Gotic (Ciutat Vella)Barcelona,Spain

An enclosed arcaded square in Barcelona entered through three narrow arches, palms and a fountain in the middle, with Gaudí's first public lampposts beside it.

Plaça Reial is a room without a roof. One continuous yellow facade runs round all four sides, an arcade runs round the ground floor, and only three narrow arched entrances are cut through it, so the noise stays inside. Palms stand in the middle around a cast-iron fountain of the Three Graces. The two lampposts either side of that fountain are the reason to look up: six arms each on a fluted shaft, with a winged helmet on top. Those lampposts are Gaudí's, made years before any of his houses. A Capuchin convent stood on this ground until the religious houses were dissolved, and Francesc Daniel Molina won the competition to replace it with a square. It is a drinking square now. From early evening the tables and the crowd take the whole floor of it. Come between eight and ten in the morning and you get chairs stacked, arcades empty, and low sun crossing one yellow range while the opposite side stands in shadow.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come between eight and ten in the morning — The arcades are empty, the tables stacked, low sun crosses the facades: the only time the square looks like architecture, not a terrace.
Pickpocketing here is constant — the square is a known working ground, especially at the arch onto La Rambla and around the crowded tables, so carry nothing in an outside pocket.
Eat somewhere else — every restaurant with tables on this square is priced and cooked for people who will not come back, and the good places are a few streets away in any direction.

Things to do

1
Read the facade from under the arcade
Step back into the covered walk on any side and look at the opposite range. The facade repeats exactly: same windows, same balconies, same yellow, all the way round with no gaps except the arches. Nowhere else in the old city is built as one designed object like this, and from underneath the arcade you can see the whole of it at once.
2
Read a lamppost from its base up
Go to one of the two tall standards beside the fountain and start at the marble plinth. Follow the shaft up through the six arms to the helmet on top. It takes about a minute and almost nobody in the square does it, although several thousand people a day walk within two metres of the first thing Barcelona ever paid Gaudi to make.
3
Come back on a Sunday morning for the trestles
Collectors set up tables of coins, banknotes and stamps under the arcades early on Sunday, and it is the one regular use of the square that is not eating. Buyers bring magnifiers and albums. It finishes by early afternoon and the tables give way to the restaurant terraces again.