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As Barcelona grew more prosperous throughout the nineteenth century, the Barri Gòtic was filled to bursting with an energetic, commercial population, and by the 1850s it was clear that the city had to expand beyond Plaça de Catalunya. The plan that was accepted was that of an engineer, Ildefons Cerdà, who drew up a grid-shaped new town marching off to the north, intersected by long, straight streets and cut by broad, angled avenues. Work started in 1859 on what became known as the Ensanche in Castilian - in Catalan, the EIXAMPLE , or "Widening". It was soon a fashionable area in which to live, and the moneyed classes started moving from their cramped quarters by the port in the old town to spacious new apartments and business addresses. As the money in the city moved north, so did a new class of modernista architects who began to pepper the Eixample with ever-more striking examples of their work, which were eagerly commissioned by status-conscious merchants and businessmen. These buildings - most notably the work of Antoni Gaudí, Lluís Domènech i Montaner and Josep Puig i Cadafalch , but others too (see "Modernisme") - are often still in private hands, restricting your viewing to the outside, but they turn the Eixample into a huge urban museum around which it's a pleasure to wander.

The Eixample is still the city's main shopping and business district, spreading out on either side of the two principal (and parallel) thoroughfares, Passeig de Gràcia and Rambla de Catalunya , both of which cut northwest from the Plaça de Catalunya. The former features several of the best-known examples of Barcelona's modernista architecture, including the famous " Mansana" de la Discòrdia ("Mansana" is adopted from the Castilian manzana , or "block") and Gaudí's La Pedrera . The latter is the district's most attractive avenue, largely pedestrianized and sporting benches and open-air cafés. Almost all the things you're likely to want to see are on the eastern side of the Rambla de Catalunya - an area known as Dreta de l'Eixample - and south of the wide Avinguda Diagonal , which slices across the entire Eixample. There's less to get excited about on the west side of Rambla de Catalunya - the so-called Esquerra de l'Eixample - which housed many of the public buildings contained within Cerdà's nineteenth-century plan. Nevertheless, certain areas provide an interesting contrast with the modernista excesses over the way, particularly those urban park projects close to the Sants Estació which heralded a movement known here as nou urbanisme .

If you're not interested in shopping or architecture, it's not immediately clear why you might spend time in the Eixample, though one bonus is that many of the buildings also contain noteworthy exhibitions and museums; the Fundació Antoni Tàpies is Barcelona's latest gallery dedicated to the work of just a single artist. Moreover, the Eixample contains the one building in the city to which a visit is virtually obligatory: Gaudí's extraordinary Sagrada Família church, beyond the Diagonal, in the northeast of the district.

As the Eixample covers a very large area, you're unlikely to be able to see everything we've described as part of a single outing. Instead, take public transport where you can to individual sites and then walk around the surrounding area; all the relevant details are given in the text. You'll find plenty of reasonable places to stop for lunch if you're looking to break up your day's foot-slogging around the streets, and you may well be in this part of town at night, too, since many of the city's trendy designer bars and restaurants are found here.

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