The ARA Premium Club moves to the Barcelona of the late 19th century

"Picasso arrived in Barcelona in 1895 from Malaga, when he was a child. He was 13 years old," explains historian Daniel Venteo to the members of the Premium Club who have signed up for the tour of Picasso's Barcelona.

We started the route at the Estació de França, which at that time had not yet been built (it is from 1929). But the oldest station on the Peninsula was there, where since 1848 the train to Mataró had been running, and also to Granollers. From this station, Picasso left Barcelona in 1900, for the first time, for Paris, a city that dazzled him.

In that same year of 1895, Picasso entered the School of Fine Arts, created by the Board of Trade. Many of the Catalan artists or those who lived in Barcelona at that time studied there. Picasso's father taught drawing classes there. The education was eminently academic, which allowed young Pablo to perfect his mastery of the pencil and the brush. It was here that he made his first friendships.

Walking towards Pla de Palau along Avinguda del Marquès de l’Argentera, we have the Porxos d’en Xifré in sight. These are porches located on the ground floor of the building commissioned by Josep Xifré, a merchant from Arenys de Mar who made his fortune in Cuba. Next to this building was the first temporary residence of the Picasso family.

On the same Avinguda del Marquès de l’Argentera, we stop in front of one of the oldest properties on this street. The date it was built is written above the portal: 1881. "Picasso surely must have noticed it, because it is the year he was born," says Daniel Venteo, author of the book Barcelona i Picasso (Editorial Efadós, within the collection La Catalunya desapareguda). As a young man, Venteo lived in the same neighborhood where we are now, around Pla de Palau. It is the neighborhood that welcomed the child and young Picasso.

"There are not many photos of Picasso in Barcelona. One of the best known is of him and some friends at the house where he lived, in front of the church of the same name," explains Daniel Venteo at Plaça de la Mercè, pointing out an imaginary line of how far the house reached. It is just a few meters from the church facade, so it was completely suffocated, and with very little sun. "The building was demolished in the 1980s, within the framework of the Ciutat Vella urban renewal policy," Venteo stresses just as an electric scooter passes by—at an excessive speed—, which brings us back to the year 2026.

The walk with Picasso's eyes through the narrow streets of the Gothic Quarter —full of tourists from very diverse backgrounds— has included not only the houses where Picasso lived —he moved several times— but also the studios where he painted, located at the top of the buildings, where there was more light. Precisely on the ground floor of the building on Carrer de la Plata where Picasso had his first studio was the Taller de Picasso gallery, which in November 1971 was destroyed in a far-right attack. This is one of the traces of Picasso that have been erased. There are also Picassian places whose locations are unknown. Carrer Avinyó and its brothels have been linked to one of the most renowned paintings by the brilliant painter, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which he painted in Paris in 1907. Venteo states that its location could not be identified.

The tour of Picasso's Barcelona is a journey to the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century (until 1904, when Picasso lived there intermittently). It also includes Els Quatre Gats, located on the ground floor of a beautiful building by Josep Puig i Cadafalch, where Pablo Picasso held an exhibition in 1900; the Sala Parés, where Picasso exhibited together with Ramon Casas in 1901, and the Picasso Museum, inaugurated in 1963, while the artist was still alive.

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