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Església de Santa María del Pi and around
With the cathedral area and Plaça del Rei sucking in every visitor at some point
during the day, the third focus of attraction in the Barri Gòtic is to the west,
around the church of Santa María del Pi – five minutes’ walk from the cathedral
or just two minutes from the Ramblas (
o
Liceu).
The fourteenth-century
Església de Santa María del Pi
(Mon–Sat
8.30am–1pm & 4.30–9pm, Sun 9am–2pm & 5–9pm,
W
www.parroquiadelpi.
com) stands at the heart of three delightful little squares. Burned out in 1936,
and restored in the 1960s, the church boasts a Romanesque door but is mainly
Catalan-Gothic in style, with just a single nave with chapels between the
buttresses. The rather plain interior only serves to set off some marvellous
stained glass, the most impressive of which is contained within a ten-metre-
wide rose window, often claimed (rather boldly) as the largest in the world.
The church flanks
Plaça Sant Josep Oriol
, the prettiest of the three
adjacent squares, an ideal place to take an outdoor coffee, listen to the buskers
or browse the weekend
artists’ market
(Sat 11am–8pm, Sun 11am–2pm).
The statue here is of Àngel Guimerà, nineteenth-century Catalan playwright
and poet, who had a house on the square.
The church is named – like the squares on either side, Plaça del Pi and
Placeta del Pi – after the pine trees that once stood here (there’s a solitary
example still in Plaça del Pi). A
farmers’ market
spills across Plaça del Pi on
the first and third Friday and Saturday of the month, selling honey, cheese,
cakes and other produce, while the cafés of
Carrer de Petritxol
(off Plaça
del Pi) are the place to come for a hot chocolate –
Dulcinea
at no. 2 is the
traditional choice – and a browse around the street’s commercial art galleries.
The most famous is at c/de Petritxol 5, where the
Sala Pares
was already well
established when Picasso and Miró were young. Meanwhile, off Plaça Sant
Josep Oriol, the old town’s
antiques trade
is concentrated in glittering
galleries and stores along c/de la Palla and c/Banys Nous.
Plaça Sant Felip Neri
Head east from Plaça Sant Josep Oriol, back towards the cathedral, and behind
the Palau Episcopal you’ll stumble upon
Plaça Sant Felip Neri
, scarred by a
bomb dropped during the Civil War and now used as a playground by the
children at the square’s school. Antoni Gaudí walked here every evening after
work at the Sagrada Família to hear Mass at the eighteenth-century church of
Sant Felip Neri. Many of the other buildings that now hedge in the small square
come from other points in the city and have been reassembled here over the last
fifty years. One of these, the former headquarters of the city’s shoemakers’ guild
(founded in 1202), houses a one-room footwear museum, the
Museu del
Calçat
(Tues–Sun 11am–2pm; €2.50;
T
933 014 533), whose collection of
reproductions (models dating back as far as the first century), originals (from as
early as the 1600s) and oddities is of some interest, not least the world’s biggest
shoe, made for the Columbus statue.
El Call Major and the Antiga Sinagoga
South of Plaça Sant Felip Neri you enter what was once the medieval Jewish
quarter of Barcelona, centred on c/Sant Domènec del Call. After decades of
neglect, the city authorities have signposted some of the surrounding streets
and points of interest in what’s known as
El Call Major
(
Call
is the Catalan
BARRI GÒTIC
|
Església de Santa María del
Pi
and around • Plaça Sant Felip Neri