Plaça del Pedró

Plaça del Pedró (‘of the stone column’), at the western end of C/ de l’Hospital, is home to the oldest monument in Barcelona, said to mark the spot where Santa Eulàlia was crucified while the snow fell to cover her nakedness. Her statue, first made of wood, was replaced with stone by the Consell de Cent in 1673. Whatever anticlerical sentiments were in the air, the neighbourhood never extended them to its virgin martyr, and saved the statue when the radical municipal government of 1823 wanted to turn it into whitewash.

She was removed in the troubles in 1835 but replaced soon after, only to be smashed by the Anarchists in 1936 (her head was rescued and is now in the Museu d’Història de la Ciutat). Frederic Marés made the current statue in 1951.

Here, too, is the simple Romanesque chapel of Sant Llàtzer, dedicated to Lazarus, patron saint of lepers; this is all that remains of the once rural Hospital dels Mesells, founded in the mid-1100s by Bishop Guillem Torroja and used as a lazaretto to quarantine sickly-looking arrivals to Barcelona.

Just up C/ Sant Antoni, the brick Esglesia del Carme is an unusual Modernista work by Josep Pericas i Morros (1911). It replaced a medieval one as lovely as Santa Maria del Mar that was lost in the fires of 1835.

Practical Info

metro Sant Antoni