Urban Spaces and Ideology: The Case of Barcelona’s Plaça Reial Square (1822-1848)

Today’s Plaça Reial square in Barcelona is the result of a process that started in the late eighteenth century, and took shape from 1822 when the Capuchin convent was relocated to the city in order to build a square dedicated to the heroes of the Napoleonic Wars. But various regime changes throughout the century decisively infl uenced the ideological concept of the square, which gradually became a commercial rather than a representative site. Nevertheless, some of the projects presented at the 1868 competition retained patriotic ideas, although they were considered in many diff erent ways, from the glorifi cation of the Spanish Empire to the vindication of the Catalan state. Based on several reports on these projects, we will analyse the interesting iconographic programmes proposed, allowing us to illustrate the wide range of ideologies present in Barcelona at the time between Romanticism and Realism.