Columbus and the Sea

Barcelona spent most of its history with its back to the sea. The city grew behind walls, and the walls had gates that were locked every night. Beyond them lay the beach, the shipyards, and the water - useful, dangerous, and firmly outside. Eleven bastions and a ring of stone kept the Mediterranean where it belonged. Then in the nineteenth century the walls came down, and Barcelona did something remarkable. It turned around. It built a sixty-metre column at the exact point where the last gate had stood, put a man on top of it, and pointed him at the horizon. Almost everything about that monument is slightly wrong. The date is wrong. The direction is wrong. The man was probably not who the city said he was. And the name carved lowest down, the only one you can actually read from the ground, belongs to someone almost nobody has heard of. Today you will walk from the last surviving gate of the medieval city to the monument that replaced it, and find out what the city got wrong on purpose. Your quest begins on Avinguda del Paral·lel, in front of a piece of wall that should not still be there.