Eixample

The Eixample ('extension') is the vast new quarter of the city begun in 1859, when Barcelona was finally allowed to grow out of its old walls. This is where you'll find the banks, the department stores, the rail stations and the offices, on broad, booming boulevards and unique eight-sided city blocks. This too is where the city's home-grown architectural revolutionaries got their big chance to build, and their works contribute much to the Eixample's electric buzz.

Wonder is what one feels in the Eixample – wonder and the realization that it really is impossible to see the world as the Modernistas saw it. It is this same wonder that surrounds Knossos or Machu Picchu or any historical and geographical one-off. Like them, the Modernista masterpieces of the Eixample speak of a season never to be recaptured, a rare combination of a blank slate, talent, skill, quirkiness, imagination and money, with Anarchist bombs providing a restless basso continuo in the background and Gaudí off in his corner trying to save their souls with his Sagrada Família.