An Eixample street corner

A seminary library outlasted war, fire and delay

On Carrer del Consell de Cent, near the Episcopal Public Library, Barcelona's oldest surviving public library, founded in 1772. It sits inside the Conciliar Seminary of Barcelona, about 300 feet from here, and still holds some 360,000 volumes for the Archdiocese of Barcelona.

Almost next door, the Museu Geològic del Seminari de Barcelona opened in 1874. It studies fossilized invertebrates, about 300 feet away.

A little farther, the Museum of Modernism Barcelona opened in 2010, in a building by architect Enric Sagnier, about 360 feet from here.

The Conciliar Seminary of Barcelona you are standing beside did not start here. The seminary moved to this spot on what was then called Diputació Street in February 1882, leaving an older building on La Rambla behind. Architect Elies Rogent designed the new building in a historicist style.

The library's books came with the move in packing crates. They went straight into the basement and stayed there for fifteen years, boxed up and unread. Cardinal Salvador Casañas i Pagès finally ordered them installed in the space built for them, and even then the job dragged on. The library did not finish moving in until 1924, forty-two years after the building first opened its doors.

The Spanish Civil War reached the shelves themselves. Seminary staff pulled more than 500 of the library's oldest manuscripts out of the building and carried them to the Library of Catalonia for safekeeping in four separate trips between July 1937 and January 1939. Some collections left behind were burned. The manuscripts that survived came back to the seminary on 9 January 1943, under librarian Josep Gros i Raguer.

The war reached the street outside, too. During the heaviest days of the Spanish Civil War bombing of Eixample, Italian and German aircraft hit Barcelona 194 times between 1936 and 1939, with the worst raids falling on 16 to 18 March 1938. The Eixample took lighter damage than the working-class districts, but whole sides of blocks came down. The ground around the seminary lived through those three days along with the rest of the neighborhood.

The library kept moving inside its own building. It shifted to the first floor in 1964. Librarian Josep Maria Martí Bonet took charge in 1971 and held the post until 2018, working with the seminary and the newly formed Faculty of Theology of Catalonia, founded in 1968, to catalog more than 370,000 books. A reformed reading room opened in 2011, with room for 47 readers and over 11,000 books on open shelves. A rebuilt storage vault opened on 16 March 2016.

In 2021, a bookshop called Llibreria Finestres opened about 120 feet from where you stand, on the same stretch of street as the seminary and its library.

On December 4, 2024, fire broke out on the first floor of 411 Carrer del Consell de Cent, at the corner with Bailèn. Eight Barcelona fire brigades and two ambulances responded. Firefighters pulled one woman out of the building. Seven people in total were treated at the scene.

In April 2025, Catalonia's high court ruled against the city's plan to turn this stretch of Carrer del Consell de Cent into a pedestrian "green axis." The court found the street's traffic classification had been changed without following the proper legal steps, and upheld a lower court's decision to overturn the project.

Less than a year earlier, in March 2025, a man in his thirties or forties, originally from Eastern Europe, was shot dead in the entrance of a building at 200 Carrer del Consell de Cent. The man was found in the basement where he lived, shot around 4 p.m. On a Tuesday. He had recently been writing a blog. Police looked into a possible connection to organized crime. Nobody was identified as the shooter.

In Barcelona itself, the city has carried violent endings for much longer than this street has existed. The Visigothic king Ataulf died here in 415. Queen Petronilla of Aragon died in the city in 1174. Blanche of Anjou, queen consort of Aragon, died here in 1310.

Llibreria Finestres still sells books a short walk from the seminary gate. The street itself remains open to cars, after the courts stepped in to block its conversion to a pedestrian walkway.

Older landmarks stand within a mile of this ground

Old Hospital de la Santa Creu, Barcelona was built in 1401, about three quarters of a mile from this point. Virreina Palace was built in 1778, about half a mile from this point.