Today we went to the Medieval part of Barcelona where we entered the El Born District and took a trip to El Born Market. Here we saw the ruins of the old Catalunya from the 1700's. Originally the ruins were undiscovered, but in the 19th century when doing renovations to the market, the ruins were uncovered.
From the outside you would never know that a huge chunk of Catalunya's history lies within the massive steel frame of the Market. The all glass frame allows for the sun to shine in and naturally light the ruins which adds to its beauty.
The view from the top of the walk way displays all of the ruins, showing the streets, houses, and buildings that were once standing tall. Now the outlines are all that remains, but there's more to it then just a bunch of rocks.
The tour guide took us down into the actual ruins and we were able to walk on the same streets that the Catalans from the 1700's walked on. That's over 300 years ago! It was an amazing experience to go down there and learn about the history of it all. For example, the picture above shows a typical entry way to a house. Even though I couldn't get a close enough picture, there is a typical game carved into one of the rocks making up the floor work. Our guide said it was very common for houses to have floor stones with the game (similar to Tic Tac Toe) carved into them.
From this view you can see the street cutting across the picture and it separating the part of the town that housed the smelly fish to the other cleaner part of town. They separated the fish side from the other part since it got very smelly and even worse with hotter weather.
The picture above shows a typical room in a house. The houses were very small width wise but our guide said they could be up to 3 stories in height!
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