GÜELL PALACE AND JEWISH ROUTE (el Call)

The Jewish Quarter of Barcelona (El Call) and its first documented reference in Barcelona dates back to the years 875-877 in times of Frankish rule. This guided tour tells the life and history of the Jewish community that lived in the El Call neighborhood of Barcelona during medieval times with first the Black Death (1348) followed by the riots (1391), which Aljama disappeared. Barcelona’s notarial registers contain a wealth of information about the economic activity of Barcelona’s Jews during the 13th and 14th centuries.

This tailor-made route has been written in collaboration with MUHBA (Barcelona History Museum). We will visit the Call Mayor: to the south the Carrer del Call, to the west by the old Roman wall and to the east by the Carrer del Bisbe without forgetting the New Baths, where the ritual of the Jewish bath Mikveh was performed.

1. By the middle of the 12th century, the number of Jews in the city had increased significantly due to emigration from the Occitan lands, where they lived in a complicated situation. That is why King Jaume I in 1257 gave permission to create a new Jewish quarter outside the surroundings of the Roman wall coinciding with the limits of the current streets of La Boqueria, d’en Rauric and de la Lleona and d’Avynó.
2. At what is now C/ Nou de la Rambla 3-5 we will enter El Palau Güell (1886-1890), the home of the Güell-López family until they moved to Park Güell. Gaudí knew how to design a functional palace with an interesting conception of space and light. Gaudí introduced a variety of solutions to the Palau Güell based on very personal approaches and created exceptional expressive forms as a result of his imagination, using traditional noble materials (stone, wood, wrought iron, ceramics, glass, etc.).
3. UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984. The building, as a work of youth, contains the essence of Gaudí’s later work and is essential to understand his architecture