I really love St Grada Familia, such a unique cathedral!
cathedral
Basilica, technically. As I understand it you can only have one cathedral per city, for some bureaucratic and / or religious reason, and Barcelona already had one. 🤷♂️
I think it’s for balancing purposes. It would be too OP if Spain could build as many cathedrals as they wanted in a city and stack culture bonuses.
Hmm, interesting, I thought a basilica was an additional designation for a cathedral, I didn’t know they could be stand alone. But I think you can only have one cathedral per bishop?
Ah, that might indeed be it, cathedral = the seat (of a bishop), and it’s bishops you can’t have too many of in the same place, lest you get a schism.
Wow… The outside looks like a Beksinski painting.
I got some weird reverse vertigo looking up from the inside when I was there, it was insanely high. Incredible place though.
Just, don’t play the organ while you’re there.
Is it not voiced for it? Last time I checked, they just had a small portable organ instead of a large installed one.
Am I the only one who thinks the outside is really really ugly
Specifically, this is Eixample
The roads in the old city are much more chaotic.
That aerial view is wild.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere USA, in a place where my nearest neighbor was a mile away.
Will images like this ever not give me massive anxiety?
This city was designed in the NES version of SimCity.
Why are there two streets running against the grid?
The one going straight to the basilica is Gaudí Avenue, named after Antoni Gaudí, the architect who designed the Sagrada Família (as well as other landmarks like Park Güell, Casa Milà / La Pedrera, or Casa Batlló); it was designed to connect the two landmarks of the Sagrada Família and the former Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau (today a UNESCO world heritage site).
The one in the background is Diagonal Avenue (no, really), one of the main thoroughfares in the city, intended by Ildefons Cerdà (designer of the Eixample) to cut through his grid layout together with Meridiana Avenue (which roughly follows the Paris meridian, or rather the Barcelona-Dunkerke one; there’s also the perpendicular Paral·lel Avenue, of course, though sadly they don’t cross), crossing at the Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes, which Cerdà intended to become the new city centre (alas, the Plaça Catalunya, some 17 blocks to the south, ended up taking that role).
Ahhh, there’s the reason for it. Thanks!
From Cities Skylines experience it’s usually to relieve traffic blocks by providing a direct path to areas/landmarks that have a higher than average traffic load. Not sure why they did it though.
That sounds like a reasonable explanation, but I’d have thought that Barcelona was laid out far before the advent of modern city planning.
This part of Barcelona pretty much was the advent of modern city planning.
Eixample was built in the mid-1800s iirc, and they did put some thought into its construction.
I can’t tell if they are actual streets, pedestrian-only areas, or bus loading/unloading zones. There look to be structures along them that could be market booths or buses.
That’s if you mean the two blocks with the diagonals going through them. If you mean the one in the back that’s slightly off-angle from the grid, my guess for that is that the road existed before the modern city did and wasn’t removed to create the grid. Or it might be a rail line.
If you mean the one in the back that’s slightly off-angle from the grid, my guess for that is that the road existed before the modern city did and wasn’t removed to create the grid. Or it might be a rail line.
Nope, that’s Diagonal Avenue, one of the cities main thoroughfares; it was part of the original design of the Eixample, intended to break the monotony of the grid, together with the north-south Meridiana Avenue.
I’m guessing you mean the one I referred to in the 2nd paragraph?
Edit: haha you added the quote while I was typing the question. Thanks for the clarification!
Yeah, sorry, I realised it wasn’t clear which part I was referring to after I had already posted it. 😅
it’s a beautiful city, but those crosswalks are so annoying
What’s up with the blue vs yellow light?
HPS vs LED lamps. LED are blue compared to HPS.
Yeah but why are there two types of lights in one city?
Some cities are replacing HPS with LED. Lamps are changed as they break, or by sections.
Barcelona isn’t the type of place to do uniform rollouts.
New vs old.
City planners: hnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggg
Is this the whole city or just the same poster neighborhood again and again? I can’t imagine the ancients having the same building codes for wage earners as they do now.
This is only Eixample, the entire city does not look like this.
I can’t imagine the ancients having the same building codes for wage earners as they do now
Mohenjo-Daro, Harappa, and other Indus valley civilization cities had grid layouts 4,600 years ago; Egypt used grid layouts around the same time; Babylon, 15th century BCE China, classical Greece and Rome, Teotihuacan… turns out that grid layouts have been the go-to for planned cities pretty much since people came up with the idea of planning cities. 🤷♂️
where are the trees?
On the sidewalks; hard to see in that light, and the picture might have been taken in autumn or winter, but I replied elsewhere in the thread with a picture showing how many of them there actually are (or just look up pictures with the keyword “eixample” and you’ll find there’s actually quite a bit of green between the blocks).
(And also parks, of course; there’s two of them in the picture right next to the basilica, but, again, in this yellow light you can’t see the green.)
Sid Meiers’ Civilization wonder completion vibes intensify.
Anyone else, for a split second, have the wrong perspective and see a weird tower with futuristic space-castle on top of it?
I do now!
detuned saw-wave synth intensifies
Looks sick on monochrome e-ink.
Without question, my favorite city of all time. 🥰🔥
Bobby: Where you going?
April: Barcelona.
I want to go to Barthelona
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