A long Eixample street

Cars give way to pedestrians along a long grid street

You're standing on Carrer del Consell de Cent, Barcelona, one of the long straight streets laid out across Barcelona's Eixample grid. The buildings on Carrer del Consell de Cent went up between 1881 and 1982. Its name honors the Consell de Cent, the "Council of a Hundred," an old Catalan city government.

In 2023, the middle stretch of this street, twenty blocks long, was turned into a living street. Cars and bikes still move through, but people on foot now have the right of way.

About a quarter mile away stands Plaça de Tetuan, Barcelona, one of the district's major squares.

A naval battle with gunpowder is fought off the coast

Long before the grid existed, this ground sat at the edge of a smaller, walled Barcelona. Out in the harbor, Aragonese and Castilian fleets fought the Battle of Barcelona (1359) over three days in June 1359, during the War of the Two Peters. An Aragonese ship mounted a bombard, among the first uses of naval artillery at sea, and damaged one of Castile's largest vessels. The fighting never reached this far inland, but it marked the city this street would later be built across.

A medieval council gives its name to the new grid

The name on the street sign came late. Barcelona's planners first just marked this line on their grid "Ll," one letter among many in Ildefons Cerdà's plan for l'Eixample. The city did not settle on Carrer del Consell de Cent, Barcelona until December 19, 1863, honoring the Consell de Cent, the old council abolished more than a century earlier in 1714.

The first buildings finished under Cerdà's new grid went up where this street crosses Carrer de Roger de Llúria. Developer Josep Cerdà i Soler built four matching corner houses there, known as the Cases Cerdà. Three still stand. The fourth, at number 342, came down in the 1960s.

Archaeologists watch the ground before new paving goes down

When the city rebuilt this stretch into a pedestrian promenade, archaeologists came first. Between September 2022 and May 2023, Barcelona's own archaeology service monitored the digging from Carrer del Comte d'Urgell to Carrer del Bruc, watching the ground before the new paving went down.

Two men are shot dead in the same doorway

Twice in 2025, this block turned violent. In April, a man was shot dead in a doorway near number 200, between Urgell and Villarroel. Police, the Mossos d'Esquadra, investigated. Then, on a Tuesday afternoon that July, a man was shot dead again, this time in the entranceway of the same building, number 200. Reports named the victim in some accounts as Shooting on Carrer del Consell de Cent, a Serbian national, and in others as Spanish. Investigators treated it as a professional killing tied to organized crime.

The street carries its history past old corner houses

The street today carries that history quietly. Pedestrians cross where cars once ran unchecked, past the surviving Cases Cerdà corner houses, past the doorway at number 200, toward squares and avenues that spread out across l'Eixample, Barcelona.

An archive is built three quarters of a mile away

General Archive of the Crown of Aragon was built in 1400, about three quarters of a mile from this point.

Older settlements and walls lie beneath the modern city

This is the older ground of Barcelona. It belongs to the city, and the corner at this point comes later. The ruins of an early settlement have been found, including different tombs and dwellings dating to earlier than 5000 BC. Some remaining fragments of the Roman walls have been incorporated into the cathedral. The city was conquered by the Visigoths in the early 5th century, becoming for a few years the capital of all Hispania. After being conquered by the Umayyads in the early 8th century, it was conquered after a siege in 801 by Charlemagne's son Louis, who made Barcelona the seat of the Carolingian "Hispanic March" (Marca Hispanica), a buffer zone ruled by the Count of Barcelona.