1867 Balaguer / Tarrago City Plan or Map of Barcelona

Renaming Streets, Reviving Catalan Identity.

This is a rare 1867 map of Barcelona, prepared for Víctor Balaguer's book Las Calles de Barcelona, which led to the renaming of streets in Barcelona's Eixample district to better reflect Catalan identity. Balaguer's street nomenclature represents a wider renaixença of Catalan identity in the mid-late 19th century.

A Closer Look

This map is oriented with northwest at top and covers the historic core of Barcelona along with the radically different, emerging Eixample district. Streets (calles, or carrers in Catalan), plazas, marketplaces, parks, gardens, and other features are labeled throughout. An alphanumeric grid surrounds the map, corresponding to an index of dozens of parishes, churches, convents, and public buildings at bottom-right. Lines of Barcelona's burgeoning suburban and interurban tram network, including the well-known 'ring road' (circunvalación), are traced.

Although the Eixample has maintained the highly rational grid layout seen here, making it one of the premier examples of fin-de-siecle urban planning and architecture in Europe, some elements of the area's geography were subsequently changed. For example, the Campos Elíseos towards top-right was a large garden and amusement park that had existed since 1853, explaining its deviance from the grid plan, but was demolished in the 1870s to make way for more urban development in the rapidly growing district. A large proposed park towards top-left and some smaller planned green spaces were also ditched for similar reasons. On the other hand, the map includes recently-planned elements that did not appear on the 1859 urban plan of Ildefons Cerdà, which had laid out the Eixample, namely the Rambla de Isabel II (now the Rambla Cataluña) and the Plaza de Cataluña.

Renaming Barcelona's Streets

In the 1860s, as Barcelona began breaking out of its Medieval walls and expanding into the sprawling grid of the Eixample district, urban planner Ildefons Cerdà initially named new streets using an alphanumeric system of letters and numbers. Hoping to instill a bit more creativity into the street names, the city council tasked the romantic-liberal intellectual and politician Víctor Balaguer with devising a proper nomenclature. Balaguer sought to remedy the historical erasure of Catalan history and culture in the names of city streets, which were explained in his book Las Calles de Barcelona. More than a simple street-naming scheme, Balaguer's two-volume work, totaling more than 1,000 pages, included a prefatory history of Catalonia, a long history of Barcelona's streets and street names, and detailed explanations for each of the new street names chosen.

Through this work and his official proposals, Balaguer replaced Cerdà's cold coordinates with names celebrating the historic territories of the Crown of Aragon (such as Aragó, València, and Mallorca), foundational civic institutions like the Consell de Cent, and iconic historical figures like Roger de Llúria. Not all his suggestions were accepted by the city; forty-eight of his sixty-six proposed names were adopted, the remainder being replaced by more 'appropriately' Spanish (and less distinctly Catalan) historical references. While subsequent political regimes (especially Franco's) would try to alter or sanitize these choices, Balaguer's 1860s vision largely triumphed, effectively turning the city plan into an open-air history textbook that permanently celebrated Catalonia's cultural pride.

Wider Context - the Renaixença

The Renaixença (Catalan Renaissance) was a 19th-century cultural and political movement dedicated to rescuing the Catalan language and national identity from centuries of systemic decline. Barcelona was at the center of this movement, acting as both the financial engine and the primary stage for the movement's grand ambitions. The spark caught fire with literary milestones like Bonaventura Carles Aribau's 1833 poem 'Oda a la Pàtria,' culminating in the 1859 resurrection of the Jocs Florals (Floral Games) inside Barcelona's City Hall, championed by Balaguer, among others. These medieval-style poetry contests effectively weaponized verse, uniting a fractured political landscape under a shared linguistic banner and transforming Catalan from a regional spoken dialect back into a prestigious language of high culture and intellectual discourse.

This cultural awakening was enabled by Barcelona's rapid evolution into Spain's industrial powerhouse, which gave rise to a wealthy, patriotic bourgeoisie eager to bankroll regional pride to distinguish themselves from the Madrid-centric establishment. This economic boom perfectly mirrored the city's physical expansion; the very year the Jocs Florals returned, Cerdà's revolutionary Eixample grid system was approved, giving the movement room to breathe and build. By the time Barcelona hosted the 1888 Universal Exposition, the Renaixença had evolved from a purely literary pursuit into the ideological and financial bedrock of Modernisme (Catalan Modernism), forever transforming the city's architecture into a living, breathing monument of national identity through the legendary works of Antoni Gaudí and his contemporaries.

Publication History and Census

This map was originally prepared by Ramón Tarrago, using Cerdà's alphanumeric street names in the Eixample, then updated by Balaguer and published in his Las Calles de Barcelona with his new street names included. It was lithographed by the Litografia Artistica, also known by the name of its founder, Don Juan Fábrega y Bosch. This map is uncatalogued in the OCLC, though the National Library of Scotland holds what may be an alternate printing or the same map miscataloged with a very similar title ('Plano de Barcelona y de su proveclado ensanche'), while Balaguer's entire book is cataloged at the British Library, the University of Birmingham, and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. A second edition of the book (Las calles de Barcelona en 1865) was published in 1888 and is more widespread.

Cartographers

Víctor Balaguer i Cirera (December 11, 1824 - January 14, 1901) was a Catalan poet, playwright, writer, and politician. He was born in Barcelona and showed artistic talent in his youth, writing his first play, 'Pepin the Hunchback,' when he was only 14 years old. Balaguer's father died when he was young and his mother disapproved of his artistic pursuits, eventually disinheriting him, but Balaguer was able to support himself as a writer while also studying law at the University of Barcelona. Through the 1840s and 1850s, he was a regular columnists in several liberal newspapers in Barcelona (often writing under a pseudonym) while also writing plays and poems. He also was more directly involved in politics as the head of the Liberal Party in Barcelona from 1843 to 1868, even though he lived in Madrid for most of this period. In Madrid, Balaguer mingled with Spain's most elite political and literary circles. He also increasingly flirted with Catalan nationalism, writing poems in Catalan and a five-volume history of the region (in Spanish). In 1867, Balaguer moved to Provence in France but returned to Spain the following year due to the Glorious Revolution and the onset of the Sexenio Democrático. Balaguer served in the provisional government as a representative for Manresa in Catalonia in the Cortes and briefly as Minister of Public Works and Minister of Overseas Territories. After the Bourbon Restoration, he resigned but eventually returned to government as the vice-resident of the Congress of Deputies and later a senator. He continued to write plays, political works, and histories well into the1890s.   Further Details...

Ramón Tarrago (fl. c. 1866 - 1874) was a cartographer and lithographer based in Barcelona. He is best known for his 1866 city plan of Barcelona that displayed the growing Eixample district, reprinted the next year with new street names by Victor Balaguer in his book Las Calles de Barcelona. Tarrago is also listed as the lithographer on an 1867 map of Catalonia ('Mapa del Principado de Cataluña con su actual limite de Provincias, Cabezas de partido y Obispados') and as having drawn and lithographed an undated railway map of Iberia ('Mapa general de todos los caminos de hierro de España y Portugal con sus estaciones y precios'). He is also recorded as the lithographer for an 1874 religious work devoted to the Castilian Saint Fructus.   Further Details...

Source

Balaguer, V., Las Calles de Barcelona. Orígen de sus nombres. Sus recuerdos, sus tradiciones y leyendas ..., 2 vols., (Barcelona: Marero) 1865-66.    

Condition

Very good. Marginal mend at insertion point, margin reinstated.

References

OCLC 316626251 (possible alternate printing). Entire book: OCLC 557954241, 163531343, 803245398.