Photos Eixample District of Barcelona

This gallery of pictures from the Eixample district of Barcelona is to give people looking for flats and apartments in Barcelona an idea of the architecture and neighbourhoods of Eixample.

 Click here to read a profile of the Eixample area of Barcelona

 Click here to find rooms, flats and real estate agents in Barcelona


The word Eixample in Catalan, or Ensanche in Spanish, literally  means “the extension”. The Spanish verb “ensanchar” means to “broaden or widen.” So this district and area of Barcelona takes it’s name from its purpose – to extend the city of Barcelona.

This area of Barcelona was created as an extension of the old city of Barcelona to keep pace with the changes that the industrial revolution was starting to bring. By the mid 19th century a fast growing and increasingly wealthy middle class of Barcelona demanded new, modern and grand residences with more space and better living conditions. In the picture below you can see the Sagrada Familia in the background.








The engineer Ildefons Cerdà (1815-1876) designed the Extension Plan of Barcelona in 1859 as a grid with blocks and straight lines. Cerda’s love of straight lines shows in his design of a 1300 hectar grid system of blocks of buildings also called 'manzanas'  measuring 113 x 113 m and covering 14% of the total municipal area at that time. This is the same area as the photo above, but taken by Google Earth.

This is the original Cerda plan.
 Click here to open a full size image of the original Cerda plan








The Eixample area of Barcelona is famous for its finearchitecture.
Casa Mila, also known as La Pedrera (the quarry,) is one of the best
known buildings in the Eixample area of Barcelona.

 Click here for more photos of La Pedrera by Antoni Gaudi.







Early morning on the Passeig de Gracis, the passage to Gracia







Early morning on the Passeig de Gracis, the passage to Gracia. This was originally a road through
fields to the village of Gracia. If you look at the Cerda plan, you can see that at the time Gracia was
a completely separate villages from the city of Barcelona.