Walk through the Gothic Quarter with a guide and follow Barcelona from the Roman town of Barcino to the medieval city built on top of
it.
Meet your guide on Plaça Nova and spend two hours walking through the Gothic Quarter, following the city from its Roman foundation to the medieval town built on top of it. The tour is organised around one question: what is actually old here, and what was rebuilt to look old.
You start beside the two Roman towers that flank the old gate on Plaça Nova, with the reconstructed aqueduct arches beside them.
Barcino was founded under Augustus around 10 BC, a small walled town of about ten hectares. Your guide traces its outline on the modern street plan and shows how the medieval and modern city grew around and over it.
A short walk away, in a narrow courtyard on Carrer Paradís, three columns of the temple of Augustus stand almost their full height, enclosed inside a Gothic building. Your guide explains how a Roman temple ended up inside a medieval house, and what that says about how cities reuse their own material.
The route continues to the cathedral square and into Plaça del Rei, the medieval square of the counts of Barcelona, built directly over Roman levels that are still visible below ground in the city museum, which your guide will point out for a separate visit.
Walking through the quarter, your guide covers a point most tours leave out: a significant part of what visitors take for medieval Barcelona was heavily restored, moved or built outright between the 1900s and the 1960s, including the famous bridge on Carrer del Bisbe, which dates from 1928. Knowing this makes the genuinely old fabric easier to recognise.
The tour ends on Plaça de Sant Jaume, the civic centre of the city since Roman times, where the city hall and the seat of the Catalan government face each other.
