From Roman Columns to the Magic Fountain: A Full Day Walking West Across Barcelona

Barcelona grew outwards from one low hill and finished, for a while, on another. The Romans built their town of Barcino around the top of Mont Tàber, where the cathedral stands today. Two thousand years later the city staged the 1929 International Exposition on the slopes of Montjuïc, a few kilometres to the south-west. This full-day walk follows that direction of travel, heading west across the city from its oldest stones to its grandest piece of twentieth-century showmanship.

The route is made for a first visit. It takes in the cathedral, a Roman temple most people walk straight past, the Rambla, an early Gaudí palace, a white modern art museum in the Raval, a covered market from the age of the Eixample, and the avenue, pavilion, palace and fountain built for 1929. It deliberately leaves out the Gaudí houses of Passeig de Gràcia and the Ribera churches, which have their own walks on this site.

There are ten stops. You will not want to go inside all of them in one day, so the notes say where it is worth paying for an interior and where the street view is enough. Start in the morning, keep the long museum visit for the afternoon, and finish at the fountain as evening falls.

In order, you will see:

• the Gothic cathedral and the columns of a Roman temple;
• the Rambla and Gaudí's Palau Güell;
• MACBA and the Mercat de Sant Antoni;
• the Venetian Towers, the Barcelona Pavilion, the National Art Museum of Catalonia and the Magic Fountain.

Begin at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia, the seat of the Archbishop of Barcelona. Work began on 1 May 1298, on the foundations of earlier churches, and most of the building went up in the fourteenth century; the cloister was completed in 1448. The elaborate front that faces the square is much younger than it looks. It is a neo-Gothic façade from the late nineteenth century, based on a fifteenth-century design and only completed in 1913.

Inside, look for two things. The high altar is raised, so you can see down into the crypt where the relics of Saint Eulalia, the city's co-patron, are entombed. Then go out into the cloister, where thirteen white geese live around the Well of the Geese; the number is usually explained by the claim that Eulalia was thirteen when she was martyred.

Walk round the back of the cathedral into the narrow Carrer del Paradís. At number 10, inside a medieval courtyard, stand the four surviving columns of the Temple d'August, a Roman temple of the first century BC dedicated to the Emperor Augustus. Each column is nearly nine metres high, with Corinthian capitals, and they rise out of a small courtyard that hides them completely from the street.

This was the highest point of Roman Barcino, the summit of Mont Tàber, and a millstone set in the street opposite number 10 marks the spot. It is a good place to picture the walled Roman town, small enough to cross in a few minutes, from which everything else on today's walk grew. The site is run by the city's history museum, MUHBA, and entry is free.

Head south-west through the Gothic Quarter to La Rambla, the long, tree-lined promenade that runs for about 1.2 kilometres from Plaça de Catalunya down to the Columbus Monument at the port. It began as a stream bed, usually dry but an important drain for rainwater coming down from the Collserola hills. In 1440 the stream was diverted outside the new city walls, and the old course slowly turned into a street.

The Rambla is really a chain of shorter streets, which is why locals often call it les Rambles: from north to south, Canaletes, Estudis, Sant Josep, Caputxins and Santa Mònica. Look down as you walk. At the Pla de l'Os, near the Liceu metro, a round pavement mosaic by Joan Miró from 1971 is set into the paving, and thousands of people walk over it every day without noticing.

A few steps off the Rambla, on Carrer Nou de la Rambla, is Palau Güell, the town house Antoni Gaudí built between 1886 and 1890 for the industrialist Eusebi Güell. It comes long before Casa Batlló or La Pedrera, and it shows many of the ideas he would develop later. The two parabolic entrance arches were wide enough for carriages to drive in through one door and out through the other, and the horses were kept in stables in the basement.

The heart of the house is a tall central hall for receiving guests, crowned by a dome pierced with small holes; lanterns hung outside at night made it look like a starlit sky. Mercè Güell i López donated the palace to the Barcelona Provincial Council in 1945, on condition that it be preserved and used for culture, and it has been part of UNESCO's "Works of Antoni Gaudí" World Heritage Site since 1984.

Now cut north-west through the Raval, the old quarter on the far side of the Rambla. Its narrow streets open suddenly onto the bright Plaça dels Àngels and the white bulk of the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, or MACBA. The American architect Richard Meier designed the building, which was inaugurated in 1995, and its white, glass-fronted façade stands out sharply against the older streets around it.

The museum is being extended into the square until early 2027, but it stays open during the works and the square remains accessible. Even if contemporary art is not on your list, the walk past the building is worth it for the contrast; the collection inside is a good choice on a day when the weather turns.

Leave the Raval at its western edge and cross the Ronda de Sant Antoni to the Mercat de Sant Antoni. Its iron framework, designed by Antoni Rovira i Trias, dates from 1882, and it was the first major market built outside the walls, in the new grid of the Eixample. After a long renovation, the rebuilt market officially reopened in 2018, keeping its historic structure.

The works brought something unexpected to light. On the lower level, the remains of the Roman Via Augusta and a Roman necropolis can be seen, a neat echo of the temple columns you saw this morning. It is also a natural place to stop for lunch or to stock up on fruit before the long walk to Montjuïc. On Sunday mornings the market hall is closed, but the Sunday book market sets up around the building, with stalls of books, comics and collectibles.

From Sant Antoni, follow the streets west to Plaça d'Espanya, the great roundabout at the foot of Montjuïc. On its south side, two tall brick campaniles flank the start of Avinguda de la Reina Maria Cristina. These are the Venetian Towers, built between 1927 and 1929 to designs by Ramon Reventós for the 1929 International Exposition. At 47 metres they are a little lower than the campanile of St Mark's in Venice that inspired them, and they are not an exact copy.

They were never meant to hold anything. Their job was to act as a gateway, marking the entrance to the exhibition grounds and the start of the grand avenue that climbs towards the Palau Nacional. Stand between them and you can see the whole composition rising up the hill in front of you.

Walk up the avenue, past the fountain you will come back to this evening, and turn right to a low, flat-roofed building that looks almost nothing like the rest of the Exposition. The Pavelló Mies van der Rohe, better known as the Barcelona Pavilion, was Germany's national pavilion in 1929, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with Lilly Reich and inaugurated on 27 May that year. It was always meant to be temporary, and it was torn down in early 1930.

What you see today is a reconstruction, built between 1983 and 1986 on the original site from historical drawings and the rediscovered footings. Walls of marble, onyx, travertine and tinted glass slide past one another under a thin roof held up on slender chrome-clad columns. In the smaller pool stands a bronze copy of Georg Kolbe's sculpture Alba (Dawn). The chair Mies and Reich designed for the pavilion, the Barcelona chair, is still in production.

Climb the steps and terraces to the domed Palau Nacional, the centrepiece of the Exposition, which has housed Catalan art collections since 1934. Today it is the National Art Museum of Catalonia, the MNAC, and it is the place to spend the longest part of your afternoon.

The highlight is the Romanesque collection: wall paintings from churches in the Pyrenees and across Catalonia, shown in reconstructed settings. The most famous is the Christ in Majesty from the apse of Sant Climent de Taüll. The museum continues through Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque art to modern Catalan art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so pick a section or two rather than trying to see everything. Before you go in or after you come out, turn round on the terrace in front of the palace: the avenue runs straight back down to the Venetian Towers and Plaça d'Espanya.

End where the day's two hills meet the city's love of spectacle. The Magic Fountain of Montjuïc was designed by Carles Buïgas for the 1929 Exposition; more than 3,000 workers built it, and its first show took place on 19 May 1929, the day before the Exposition opened. It was badly damaged in the Spanish Civil War and only worked again from 1955, music was added to the light shows in the 1980s, and it was fully restored before the 1992 Olympic Games.

The fountain sits just below the palace steps, so you reach it on your way back down. Its evening shows of water, light and music run only on certain days, and the schedule changes with the season, so check the official programme before you plan your day around it. If there is a show, wait for it here; if not, the view up to the lit palace is a fine end to the walk.

In one day you have crossed Barcelona from the top of Roman Barcino to the 1929 Exposition. Along the way you passed Gothic stone, a stream bed turned promenade, Gaudí's first great house, a white museum of the 1990s and a market built when the city first broke out of its walls. The Roman road under Sant Antoni and the temple columns on Mont Tàber link the start of the walk to its middle, and the towers, pavilion, palace and fountain show how confidently the city presented itself to the world a century ago. Together they show a city that has kept moving outwards and kept building on what it found.