Barcelona 1700. From stones to people

Stable Exposure

The archaeological interventions carried out within the enclosure of the old El Born market have made it possible to know in detail a fragment of the urban fabric of Barcelona, as well as to find traces of the life that developed there.

Among the large amount of documentation conserved, the wills of the residents of the area and the inventories corresponding to many of the homes that appeared have allowed us to discover, first hand, how people lived in Barcelona at the time.

In Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, just over 38,000 people lived there. It was a very diverse population, with a good number of citizens from different localities and cultures. It was a society connected to the world thanks to a strong commercial activity, well fed and passionate about sweets, strongly marked by religiosity and superstition, with a taste for colorful colors and ornaments in clothing, which was given to the party, dance, music, theater and play.

Between 1691 and 1714, this Barcelona suffered the horror of war. After the defeat, nothing was the same again.

Objects and Bombs

The exhibition shows some 2,100 objects that were found during the archaeological intervention in the site and its surroundings, which have contributed new and valuable knowledge to form a portrait of the daily life of how the inhabitants of Barcelona lived three centuries ago. The vast majority of the objects are exhibited in the great showcase of the Villarroel Room and constitute, at the same time, a great tribute to the inhabitants of the neighborhood who were expelled after 1714. Those objects that they could not take away in 1716 and 1717 when they were removed from their homes, the Barcelona of the 21st century has recovered them to show them to the world.

Linked to the stable exhibition, at the foot of the site you can also see three exhibition spaces with objects. The most remarkable is the War Room, where a selection of the more than three hundred bombs of various dimensions, types and materials that were located during the excavation will be shown. This room is at the end of the tour of the site, and through a play of mirrors that reproduce the bombs to infinity, evokes the horror of the bombings that the inhabitants of this fragment of city had to suffer during the siege of 1714.

The exhibition Barcelona 1700. From stones to people, it is structured in five large areas:

• The Great House
• The prosperous City
• Daily Life
• The attacked and mutilated City
• The Rebuilt City