
Mercat de Sant Antoni
Iron-framed market built over a buried Roman road, now home to a vast Sunday book fair.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Mercat de Sant Antoni in Barcelona starts with what turned up when engineers tore into the market for a renovation: a two-thousand-year-old Roman road, once lined with tombs just outside ancient Barcino's walls. It traces the market's own 1882 origins as a cast-iron landmark designed by Antoni Rovira i Trias, and how a secondhand book fair fleeing the Paral·lel avenue settled here for good in 1936, as Spain slid toward civil war. Sundays still bring browsers to the same pavements above the buried gate.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Mercat de Santa Caterina
Undulating market roof of over three hundred thousand hexagonal ceramic tiles in a rainbow of colors, over exposed medieval convent ruins.
La Concepció Market
Cast-iron nineteenth-century market hall with three naves, ringed by flower stalls open around the clock.
Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes
Centuries-old flea market crowned by a golden mirrored canopy over a buried highway roundabout.
El Born Centre de Cultura i Memòria
Iron market hall built over ruins of a neighborhood razed as war punishment in 1714.
Mercat dels Encants de Barcelona
Sprawling flea market under a golden mirrored canopy, with a centuries-old dawn auction still held three mornings a week.
Mercat de la Boqueria
Sprawling covered food market of hundreds of stalls, built on the ashes of a burned convent.