Plaça de Sant Felip Neri

Step in slowly. Plaça de Sant Felip Neri is one of the quietest corners of the Gothic Quarter, with its octagonal fountain and light filtering through the trees. But the church front ahead of you tells a different story.

1An old burial ground

Before the square there was a cemetery here, known as the cemetery of the condemned, where people executed by the city were buried. In 1809, during the Napoleonic occupation, several patriots executed for plotting against the French were laid to rest in it. The congregation of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri began building its Baroque church in 1748, taking over part of that ground.

230 January 1938

During the Spanish Civil War, aircraft flying for the rebel side bombed Barcelona again and again. On 30 January 1938 a bomb fell on this square. Forty-two people died, most of them children who had taken shelter in the church basement. The marks you see in the stone were left by the shrapnel that day.

For decades people said these were the marks of firing squads; historical research showed they came from the shrapnel of the bombing.

That widespread confusion is the square's real mystery: one memory quietly replaced by another. Today a plaque remembers the victims. After the war, the city architect Adolf Florensa rebuilt the square and brought here the Renaissance fronts of the guild houses of the coppersmiths and the shoemakers, dismantled from other streets.

3What to look for

• The shrapnel marks on the church front.
• The plaque in memory of the victims of the bombing.
• The shoemakers' guild house, with its relocated Renaissance façade.