Barcelona Guide
The Eixample
The Eixample – the gridded, nineteenth-century new-town area north of Plaça de Catalunya – is the city's main shopping and business district. It covers a vast expanse spreading north to the outlying hills and suburbs, though most of what there is to see lies within a few blocks of the two central, parallel thoroughfares, Passeig de Gràcia and Rambla de Catalunya. To visitors, the district's regular blocks and seemingly endless streets can appear offputting, while many locals experience only a fraction of the district on a daily basis.
As Barcelona grew more industrialized throughout the nineteenth century, the old town became overcrowded and unsanitary. Conditions were such that in 1851 permission was given by the Spanish state to knock down the encircling walls so that the city could expand beyond its medieval limits, across the plain to the hills beyond the old town. Following a pioneering plan drawn up by engineer Ildefons Cerdà i Sunyer, work started in 1859 on what became known as the Ensanche in Castilian, and Eixample in Catalan – the "Extension" or "Widening".
As the money in the city moved north, so did a new class of modernista architects, who began to pepper the Eixample with ever-more-striking examples of their work. These extraordinary buildings – most notably the work of Antoni Gaudí i Cornet, Lluís Domènech i Montaner and Josep Puig i Cadafalch – provide the main attraction for visitors to the Eixample, turning it into a sort of open-air urban museum, particularly along the attractive central spine of Passeig de Gràcia. Almost everything else you're likely to want to see is found to the east of here in the area known as Dreta de l'Eixample (the right-hand side) where, aside from the architecture, attractions include museums concentrating on Egyptian antiquities, and Catalan art and ceramics. Further east is Gaudí's extraordinary Sagrada Família church – the one building in the city to which a visit is virtually obligatory. A few blocks south, Barcelona's major avenues meet at the swirling roundabout of Glòries, where a further set of attractions await, including the city's biggest flea market, its main concert hall and music museum, and Catalunya's flagship national theatre building.