Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The nineteenth-century street grid north of Plaça de Catalunya is the city's main shop-
ping and business district. It was designed as part of a revolutionary urban plan -
the Eixample in Catalan (pronounced
aye-sham-pla
, the “Extension” or “Widening”) -
that divided districts into regular blocks, whose characteristic wide streets and shaved
cornerssurvivetoday.Twoparallelavenues,PasseigdeGràciaandRambladeCatalun-
ya,arethebackboneoftheEixample,witheverythingtotheeastknownastheDretade
l'Eixample (the right-hand side). It's here, above all, that the bulk of the city's famous
modernista
buildings are found, along with an array of classy galleries and fashionable
hotels,shopsandboutiques.It'snotaneighbourhoodassuch-andyouwon'tbeableto
see everything described in this chapter on a single outing - but the Dreta does contain
many of the city's most stylish, show-stopping buildings.
In many ways the Dreta de l'Eixample acts as a sort of open-air museum, featuring the mas-
terworks of a new class of
modernista architects
, who began to change the way Barcelona
looked from around 1880 onwards. These extraordinary buildings - most notably by An-
toni Gaudí i Cornet, Lluís Domènech i Montaner and Josep Puig i Cadafalch - were eagerly
commissioned by status-conscious merchants and businessmen and, though most were ori-
ginally built as private houses and apartments, many have subsequently been opened to the
public. Most are found within the triangle formed by the Passeig de Gràcia, Avinguda Diag-
onal and the Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, and all are within a few blocks of each other.
Thestand-outsightsareGaudí's
LaPedrera
apartmentbuilding,andtheso-called
Mansana
de la Discòrdia
, or “Block of Discord” (Pg. de Gràcia, between carrers del Consell de Cent
and d'Aragó), which gets its name because the three adjacent houses, casas
Lleó Morera
,
Amatller
and
Batlló
-builtwithinadecadeofeachotherbythreedifferentarchitects-show
off wildly varying manifestations of the
modernista
style and spirit. Also in the Dreta is the
not-to-miss
gallery
dedicated to Catalunya's most eminent postwar artist Antoni Tàpies, not
to mention a great neighbourhood
market
.
