A time tunnel in Barcelona
Barcelona has 73 neighbourhoods, some of which are largely unknown. Neighbourhoods inhabited by perhaps 20,000 people. Each one with its own idiosyncrasy, its history, its people. Does anyone know where Sant Genís dels Agudells is? It sounds like a village in the Pyrenees, doesn't it? Well, no, it's at the foot of Tibidabo. In the heart of the city there are also those who pass by discreetly. For example, the Sant Pere neighbourhood, which you may know from the triplet of parallel streets of Sant Pere Més Alt, Mitjà and Més Baix. Do you know anything else? These winding streets are the core of a sector of the old city, with narrow, damp streets, intense smells, and a dense but forgetful memory. They border above with the stately Eixample. It is surely the sector of the Gothic Quarter that is less Gothic, less sugary, and yet more medieval. It forms a unit with Santa Caterina and la Ribera. Tourists tend to go to the last two. From the top, they usually don't go beyond the Palau de la Música.
If you want to immerse yourself in the life of Saint Peter, you can now do so with the help of the novelThe passage by Maria Carme Roca, winner of the 2025 Santa Eulalia Prize. It will take you back to the end of the 19th century and the 20th century, when Barcelona made the leap to modernity, the walls fell and the city began the cosmopolitan path that has led us to the contradictory moment in which we find ourselves today, stunned by so much success. The starting shot was first the Cerdà Plan and then the Universal Exhibition of 1888 where the infamous Ciutadella, neighbouring Sant Pere, had been located.
Craftsman and pre-industrial, with textile workshops – embroiderers, sergers, ironers –, with lost trades, with human and commercial hustle and bustle, San Pedro was a confluence of social classes. This mixed character has been maintained. Today the mix is both economic levels and cultures: you find everything from Muslim oratories to artists' workshops, from luxurious tourist apartments to slums where recently arrived immigrants eke out a living. To make myself clear, it is a Ravalea, but it is quieter and more solitary than the Raval. Every morning I cross it on my way to work, usually by bike. If it rains I do it on foot and that is when I pass through the passage that gives its title to the book by Maria Carme Roca, an author who through hard work and years has made a name for herself in Catalan literature. Born in the Jewish quarter, for her Barcelona is more than just a literary stage: it is her vital intimacy.
The passage in question, called the Manufacturas (it had other names) goes from Trafalgar (formerly called Calle del Hort d'en Favà) to Sant Pere Més Alt. It has some stairs going down that transport you back in time: from the 20th to the 19th century and further back. Today most of it is occupied by a hotel –Urban– and a restaurant –Flash & Kale Passatge–. A couple of decades ago it was full of little shops and run-down workshops, all very tacky. Even now, at the entrance on Trafalgar, a florist sets up shop on some days, a reminder of the small business of yesteryear.
The passage was built in 1878 by the textile industrialist Joan Cirici. Maria Carme Roca has breathed life and memory into it. And she has linked it to the other nearby passage that connects the same streets: the more stately Sert Street. The protagonist of the book is Regina, an orphan who ends up serving in the Sert household, where the youngest son, Josep Maria, a future muralist painter, is the king of the party. Like that Barcelona that was awakening and opening up to the world, Sert would end up triumphing in the United States, decorating the Rockefeller Center and the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York with his characteristic grisaille art. He also decorated the Vic Cathedral and the Hall of Chronicles of the Barcelona City Council. By the way, do not confuse him with the architect Sert, Josep Lluís, his nephew, more left-wing and artistically rationalist. Author of the Miró Foundation, who was for years a factotum of world architecture as dean of Harvard, in Boston.
The Serts came from Sant Pere, from that Barcelona that was bursting at its own seams, that of the Renaissance and Modernism, that of choral choirs and theatre, that of anarchism and Torres i Bages, that of Catalanism and hygienism. That's where we all come from.