Barcelona Audio Tours

The Romans built a military camp on Mons Taber hill in around 15 BC and the Catalan government building stands on the same spot today, which tells you something about how layered Barcelona is. The Gothic Quarter preserves the Roman street grid under medieval stonework. The Eixample, the vast 19th-century grid expansion designed by Ildefons Cerda in the 1850s, was radical urban planning for its time, with chamfered corner buildings and wide streets built for the industrial city that Barcelona intended to become. Antoni Gaudi then used those corner buildings as his canvas, and Casa Batllo and Casa Mila on Passeig de Gracia are among the most formally inventive pieces of architecture anywhere in Europe.

The 1992 Olympics were the second reinvention.

The industrial waterfront was demolished, three kilometres of beach were created from scratch, and the city spent a decade building infrastructure that transformed how it connected to itself. The result is a city that functions both as a dense, walkable historical centre and as a modern Mediterranean coastal resort, which is a difficult combination to pull off. The Barceloneta neighbourhood, still identifiable as a 18th-century maritime grid, sits immediately behind the beach. El Born, east of the Gothic Quarter, became Barcelona's most interesting neighbourhood for food and design in the 2000s as it gentrified around the iron-and-glass Mercat de Santa Caterina.