Passeig de Gràcia is the backbone of the Quadrat d’Or . It is a boulevard with a mixture of private residences, banks, cinemas, prestige establishments, coffee bars and many treasures of Modernisme. (map)
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Initially, the boulevard was a simple dirt track that ran from the city walls of Barcelona to the neighbouring town of Gràcia. This began to change in 1827, when it was converted into a tree-lined boulevard. In 1852, the first gaslights were installed, and one year later a large leisure zone called Camps Elisis with gardens, bars, restaurants, dance halls, amusements and an open-air auditorium, was opened in the section between Carrer Aragó and Carrer Mallorca.
In 1872 the first horse-drawn tramway began to operate, and from the 1890’s onward it became the new residential centre of the upper middle classes.
With a little imagination, you can still hear the horse-drawn carriages, smell the early trams and visualise the elegant ladies walking arm in arm with their husbands, accompanied by their maids who are looking after the children. This is what the Passeig de Gràcia was like in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Barcelona was expanding, the new boulevard connected the old village of Gràcia with the new city centre.
Barcelona’s new artery was the place moneyed bourgeois families chose to live. On either side of the street, they constructed imposing buildings that continue to delight everyone who passes by. These jewels of Catalonia’s home-grown art nouveau, modernisme, and the later movement, noucentisme, were created by architects of the calibre of Gaudí (La Pedrera and the Casa Batlló), Puig i Cadafalch (Casa Amatller), and Domènech i Muntaner (Casa Lleó Morera), to name just three.
Two of the most striking ornaments of the Passeig: its 31 benches-cum-streetlamps, designed in 1906 by Pere Falqués, which may pass unnoticed among the diversity of modern urban elements, and the panots (pavement tiles), copied from the floor tiles designed by Gaudí for Casa Batlló, which were finally installed in the kitchens and service areas of La Pedrera. In 2002 the City Council repaved the avenue with them: hexagonal tiles that are all alike yet when set together reveal the marine motifs: an octopus, a conch and a starfish.
The tiles were among the first mass-produced paving tiles in Catalonia, by the company Escofet.
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