Barcelona Cathedral Gothic Quarter
— a Gothic shadow with thirteen white geese.
Not only on a wall.
Barcelona Cathedral Gothic Quarter, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The Catedral de la Santa Creu i Santa Eulàlia, the seat of the archbishop of Barcelona, set on the highest ground of the old Roman town. The Gothic interior went up across the 14th and 15th centuries; the spire-and-pinnacle façade is a 19th-century completion to a medieval drawing. The cloister keeps thirteen white geese, one for each year of the girl saint Eulàlia's life. Around the cathedral the Barri Gòtic runs in narrow stone streets that have been streets for two thousand years.
The place, in three passes.
The cathedral sits at the centre of the Barri Gòtic, the old quarter that grew up on the footprint of Roman Barcino, founded around 15 BC on a small hill called Mons Taber. Construction of the present Gothic cathedral began in 1298 under King Jaume II and was largely complete by 1448, replacing an 11th-century Romanesque cathedral on the same site. The west façade, with its pinnacles and central spire, was added between 1887 and 1913 to a 15th-century design by Charles Galters that had never been built. The building remains the seat of the Archdiocese of Barcelona.
The interior is Catalan Gothic at its purest: a single nave with side aisles, slender octagonal columns, and 28 side chapels set between the buttresses. Eulàlia, co-patron of the city, is buried in an alabaster sarcophagus in the crypt under the high altar; she was reportedly martyred at thirteen during Roman persecutions around AD 303. The cloister opens off the south aisle around a small garden with a central fountain, and is kept by a flock of thirteen white geese, traditionally said to count the years of Eulàlia's life. The Romanesque chapel of Santa Llúcia, from 1268, survives as the south entrance.
The cathedral sits on the Pla de la Seu in the Barri Gòtic, a few minutes' walk from Plaça Sant Jaume and the Liceu metro on La Rambla. Free worship hours and paid tourist hours alternate through the day; tourist admission is around 11 euros and covers the nave, the cloister, the rooftop terraces, and the museum. The rooftop, reached by a small lift from inside the cathedral, gives a clean view across the medieval rooftops to Santa Maria del Mar and the sea. The corpus-Christi tradition of the dancing egg, l'ou com balla, runs on the cloister fountain each June.
