Sant Pau del Camp is the oldest church building standing in Barcelona, and the cloister is the reason to come. It is tiny, ten paces across, and the arches around it are lobed rather than round, cut into three and five scallops. The name still means what it says — Saint Paul in the field — because when it was built there was nothing here but market gardens outside the city wall. Today a chain-link fence around a basketball court runs behind it, and you hear the game from the garden.
A tombstone found here belongs to Count Guifré Borrell, who died in 911, so a monastery of some standing already stood on the spot. The church you walk into is later, rebuilt in the twelfth century after the earlier one was destroyed. Its builders reused what they found: the capitals over the west door are carved work from the sixth or seventh century, three or four hundred years older than the doorway holding them. The monastery was closed down in 1835 and did not come back to religious use for most of a century.