Mercat Central: seventeen years after the silver pickaxe

Alfonso XIII struck a wall on the square in October 1910. Goods have been sold here since the Middle Ages, long from dismantlable stalls, and the open-air market of the previous century had become too small. Six projects competed. The city chose the one by Alejandro Soler March and Francisco Guardia Vial, two collaborators of Domènech i Montaner. More than forty houses came down to make room for the market.

The work bogged down. City hall demanded changes, and the project that was built bears the date of November 1914. Soler and Guardia gave up directing the work. Enrique Viedma, the municipal architect, took it over; Ángel Romaní joined him to modify the great dome, a year before the opening. It rises thirty meters, covered in gray scales. At the very top, above a gilded crown, the weathervane is a green parrot. The second, smaller dome has its own: a fish. It lights and ventilates the fish market.

The main gable is gridded in red. Ceramic rods with a copper sheen cross in a star pattern on white tiles with blue flowers. Three large round-arched bays are cut into it, closed with gray slats and topped with a stained-glass window. In the middle one, a striped diamond under a crown, between two Ls. In the others, red roses wind through green foliage. Gray metal colonnettes rise in pairs between the bays, and iron marquees curve out over the entrances.

The interior is laid out in streets. Stalls line straight aisles crossed by two wide thoroughfares; 959 had been planned. Slender cast-iron pillars carry the metal roof frame, and the eye runs from one end of the hall to the other. The great dome stands at the crossing of the two axes.

The back is of pale stone. Two round turrets raise their small domes with gilded scales there, on either side of tall windows with wooden crossbars. Viedma and Romaní completed the whole: the market was inaugurated on January 23, 1928, seventeen years after the pickaxe. Selling still goes on here, Monday to Saturday, until 3 p.m.