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THE EIXAMPLE
|
The Eixample
T
he
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. Indeed, the Eixample can’t really be said to be a single neighbour-
hood at all – at least not in the same way that the old-town
barris
distinguish
themselves – though its genesis lay in the increasingly crowded streets and
alleys of the Ciutat Vella.
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 encir-
cling 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, which were eagerly commissioned by status-conscious
merchants and businessmen.These extraordinary buildings – most notably the
work of Antoni Gaudí i Cornet, Lluís Domènech i Montaner and Josep Puig i
Cadafalch (see colour section) 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, with a special draw provided by the gallery devoted to the works of
Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies. 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 of here, Barcelona’s major avenues all 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.
There’s rather less to get excited about on the western, or left-hand side – the
so-called
Esquerra de l’Eixample
– which houses many of the public
buildings contained within the original nineteenth-century plan. Nevertheless,
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