Sant Andreu de Palomar

Neighborhood · Sant Andreu de Palomar (Sant Andreu)Barcelona,Spain

A working-class town swallowed by Barcelona in 1897 that kept its own square, rambla and the brick sheds of the thread mill that built it.

Sant Andreu de Palomar still has the shape of the town it used to be. Its centre is Plaça d'Orfila, where the old town hall stands, with a main street of low shopfronts running off it and a rambla of its own a few blocks away. The streets here work for the neighbourhood rather than for visitors. A few minutes north, the brick sheds of the Fabra i Coats thread mill, built in 1890 and 1905, are now a cultural complex. Thread is what built the town. A spinning works begun in the 1840s grew into Fabra i Coats, one of the first large mills in Spain, and the population rose more than eightfold between 1860 and 1920. Barcelona swallowed the municipality in 1897. Residents formed a committee to reverse the annexation and lost in the administrative courts in 1902. Gràcia, another village taken the same way, turned bohemian; Sant Andreu stayed working-class. Walk out of the square in any direction and you are on streets that get on with their own day around you.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Look for the workers' clubs, not the monuments — The educational centre and the athenaeum are ordinary buildings with plaques, and they tell you more about what this place was than the church does.
The mill yard is open to walk into — You can enter the Fabra i Coats yard between the brick sheds without a ticket, and what is happening inside changes with the day.
Come when something is on — This is a district that still runs its own festivals and human-tower practices, and outside those hours it is simply a quiet residential quarter.

Things to do

1
Stand in the square the town governed itself from
Plaça d'Orfila is a small, plain square, and what matters is the building on it: this was the town hall of a separate municipality, not a district office. Barcelona took it over and went on using it. Stand with your back to the church, look at the front of the town hall, and the annexation turns into something you can see.
2
Walk into the thread mill
You walk into the Fabra i Coats yard straight from the street, and the brick sheds around it are the original ones. Take the passage between them. What is going on changes from day to day: rehearsal rooms, an exhibition, a school playground, or nothing at all. A working factory yard was busy in the same unpredictable way.
3
Come for the Tres Tombs, the horse and cart procession
Sant Andreu still runs its own processions, and the one to catch is the Tres Tombs, which goes through the middle of the district with horses and carts. Working animals and drivers in old dress pass down streets full of parked cars. The district holds it for itself, not as a show put on for visitors.