Barcelona City Hall

This guide to Barcelona City Hall, the Casa de la Ciutat, opens in 2008, when a maintenance crew pulled back an ordinary ceiling panel and found painted faces staring down that nobody working there knew existed. It follows the building's layered history: the stern neoclassical facade finished in 1847 by Josep Mas i Vila, the older Gothic front around the corner on Carrer de la Ciutat raised between 1399 and 1402, and the Saló de Cent inside, begun in 1369, where a council of one hundred citizens once ran the city's affairs.