Plaça del Rei

Plaça del Rei sits in the heart of Barcelona's Gothic Quarter. Surrounding buildings wall the fourteenth-century square in, and together they form a nearly complete picture of medieval Barcelona. Step in from the street and the atmosphere turns quiet.

The Palau Reial Major dominates the square: the counts of Barcelona lived there from the thirteenth to the early fifteenth centuries. What you see is mostly thirteenth-century Gothic remodelling of an eleventh-century predecessor, with Visigothic and Romanesque stones at the base. Inside sits the Saló del Tinell, a great hall on round arches regarded as the palace's most representative room. Beside it rises the fourteenth-century royal chapel of Santa Àgata, built on top of the old Roman wall. Its octagonal bell tower is shaped like a crown. Jaume Huguet's altarpiece hangs within, a well-known example of Catalan Gothic art. Across the square, the sixteenth-century Palau del Lloctinent holds a Renaissance courtyard and the Archive of the Crown of Aragon. Casa Padellàs completes the enclosure, a palazzo moved here stone by stone from another street in 1931. The move uncovered Roman ruins underneath, and since 1943 the Barcelona City History Museum has made its home there. Down below, glass floors carry you over the streets, walls and workshops of Roman Barcino. The remains include a laundry from the second century AD, and one display covers Roman wine production. The route spans two thousand years of city history, taking in the great hall and the chapel above ground.

A fifteenth-century lookout, the Mirador del Rei Martí towers over the square, while Eduardo Chillida's sculpture Topos V sits in one corner. Locals will tell you that Ferdinand and Isabella greeted Columbus here after his first voyage to the Americas. Some historians put the royal couple at their summer residence instead. Whether or not it happened here, the enclosed setting makes the scene easy to picture.