Arc de Triomf

Why it looks Moorish, and why that explanation is wrong

The arch is built of reddish brick with carved stone dressings, in a style called neo-Mudéjar, and it looks nothing like the stone arches of Paris or Rome.

Older accounts explain this by saying the style is Moorish, "not surprising since they dominated Spain for centuries". That gets it wrong twice.

• Neo-Mudéjar is a nineteenth-century revival, not a survival. Mudéjar was the work of Muslim craftsmen under Christian rule in medieval Spain; neo-Mudéjar was a deliberate historicist choice by Victorian-era architects looking for a national style in brick, and it was fashionable across Spain in the 1880s for stations, bullrings and exhibition buildings.
• Catalonia was barely under Muslim rule at all. Barcelona was taken by the Franks in 801, after some eighty years — not centuries. The Islamic centuries belong to Andalucia, not here, which makes the borrowed style a choice rather than an inheritance.

Older accounts also claim that Islamic art "contains no human or animal figures", offered as an explanation for the arch's statues. That is true of religious art and not of Islamic art generally — the Alhambra's own fountain is carried by twelve stone lions.

The sculpture

Four friezes run round the top, and they are the point of the building.

• Barcelona rep les nacions — Barcelona welcoming the nations — faces the city, by Josep Reynés. The city, personified, receives her foreign visitors. It is the whole purpose of the arch in one panel.
• Recompensa — the giving of prizes to exhibitors — faces the park, by Josep Llimona.
• The two side friezes, representing agriculture, industry and trade and the sciences and arts, are by Antoni Vilanova and Torquat Tassó.

Above them the frieze carries the arms of the Spanish provinces, with Barcelona's own in the centre of the city-facing side — a coat of arms, not a logo. The brick piers are capped with small ornamented turrets and finials, which repay a look upward and are hard to make out from directly beneath.

The arch was restored between 1989 and 1991, before the Olympic Games.

Where it stands

At the head of the Passeig de Lluís Companys, a broad planted promenade that runs from the arch down to the Parc de la Ciutadella — the exhibition site, which the arch was built to lead into, and which still holds the Catalan parliament, the zoo and Domènech i Montaner's Castell dels Tres Dragons from the same exhibition.

The promenade is named after the president of Catalonia who was executed at the castle on Montjuïc in 1940.

Metro to Arc de Triomf, which comes up beside it. It is floodlit at night, it is free, it takes ten minutes, and it is the finish line of the Barcelona marathon.

General practicalities for the city are on the Barcelona page.