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Preface
The following text has been taken from the introduction to the Diccionari
Nomenclàtor de les Vies Públiques de Barcelona, 1996 (Ajuntament
de Barcelona, 1996-1997). This introduction was composed especially
for this publication. It has been included because it is considered useful
for those who wish to know more about the street names of the city, the
reasons behind the changes over the years, and the methodology of the
researcher and compiler of this data, Jesus Portavella i Isidoro. |
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The origin of street names
The majority of street names in the historical centre (Ciutat Vella)
descend from the Middle Ages. An important group refers to the names of
ancient landowners or families established in the city and other prominent
people of the time. Others, the origins of which are less clear, are versions
of the original whose spelling has been corrupted over the years. These
arose from the dominance of the spoken rather than the written version
of a particular name.
The first increase in the number of roads was due to the expansion of
the city and surrounding towns in the nineteenth century. At that time
a large number of residential developments sprang up through private enterprise.
As the urbanisation project was approved by the City Council the names
of the roads that appeared on the plans of the project were also approved.
Each development brought about the creation of new streets whose names
were chosen either by the owner of the land or his colleagues. It is therefore
almost impossible to identify the reasons behind the names chosen for
many of these streets, as the names were created either for personal reasons
or on the whim of the landowner. However, it is easy to prove how this
custom of applying the name of the owner/s or his relatives to the roads
of the urbanisation of which he was the promoter became so deep-rooted
in Barcelona at that time.
In documents published in the nineteenth century Cerda's project for the
enlargement of the city (the Eixample) is notable. The task of
assigning names to streets was given to Victor Balaguer. In the twentieth
century, between 1907 to 1929, the City Council approved names without
any clear proof of the reason for the dedications. Furthermore, street
names were often approved after consideration had been given to different
proposals put forward by the Consistori (Town Council) and various
concerns expressed by individuals, associations and groups of neighbours.
The integration of the towns surrounding Barcelona required special treatment
in the naming of public streets because of the resulting duplication of
names and later because of the translation of the names to Spanish.
During the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, a thorough modification of
names deep-rooted in the history of the city was carried out by the then
commissioner of the Ponència de Nomenclatura (Committee for the
Naming of Streets), Ignasi de Ros i Puig. Many street names were replaced
by ones which had a reference to Spanish history from the point of view
of the established regime.
The other change in the naming of the city's streets occurred with the
proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic and above all with the end
of the Civil War. This led to a great number of street names being changed.
Finally, with the advent of democracy, they were standardised and translated
into Catalan. Almost sixty street names changed. These changes are reflected
in the Nomenclàtor 1980 de les Vies Públiques (The 1980 Dictionary
of Street Names).
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Research by the City Council
The City Council has not always shown such interest in informing city
dwellers of the meaning and the history of the names that have been chosen
over the years to identify the city's public highways.
At the beginning of the twentieth century with the expansion that the
enlargement of the city represented and the joining up of the towns that
surrounded it, the number of streets grew in an impressive manner. Problems
arose when, with the integration of the towns, the Ciutat Vella,
the enlargement, and even within the incorporated towns themselves, street
names were often duplicated.
These problems were passed to the Comissió de Foment (Commission
for Promotion) of the City Council which produced the first attempt to
classify and study streets. In 1917 the authors Ramon Nonat Comas i Pitxot
and Josep Roca i Roca were given the job of writing 'A composition of
short explanations of the meanings behind the street names in the Ciutat
Vella.' In 1918 Ramon N. Comas died and the work continued until it
was finished in 1922. When it was completed, it comprised a total of 2186
pages. Despite attempts to publish it, it ended up as an unpublished manuscript
in the city's Historical Archives.
As a result, in 1917, the historian and archaeologist Agusti Duran i Sanpere
was brought in to the municipal archives and was vital to the promotion
of the Office of Research and Publications. The Ponència de Retolació
de Carrers (Commission for Street Plaques) was also created. Given
the lack of definition of the meaning of many streets as well as the existence
of duplicated names, in 1930 the Ponència gave the then Director
of Historical Archives the responsibility of preparing a brief report
on the matter. The work was presented more as a classification of street
names and their meaning than as an accurate explanation of the origins
or reasons of the dedication to a certain person or deed.
Duran i Sanpere himself in the abovementioned tract exposed the difficulties
in knowing the origins of the street names. "Many of these names
were given with little accuracy and it is not easy to know who the person
is to whom they refer." He later wrote, "The practical reasons
which could have advised them to change the name of a public road or not,
despite the disturbances that this always caused, escape our knowledge.".
In 1981 the City Council published the Nomenclàtor 1980 de les Vies
Publiques de Barcelona. The publication filled a gap that had existed
for many years. Given the time constraints and the desire of the Administration
to publish the first catalogue in Catalan as soon as possible there was
insufficient time to dedicate to the investigation. The team of compilers,
however, was aware of this, as was stated in the prologue by the then
President of the Ponència de Nomenclatura, Miguel Ponseti i Vives:
"Consequently, this first edition could contain gaps and errors. However,
we will continue our research to fill in the former and to correct the
latter…"
With the recent creation of the Historical Archives for each borough,
the City Council has some potential centres of research at its disposal,
which complete the network of public archives and these are now much more
within the reach of the researchers. The archiver himself is the first
to be interested in the investigation and the correct interpretation of
street names. A number of similarly-themed publications have arisen from
the boroughs.
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Orthographical guidelines
With regard to the orthography of common nouns the grammatical rules of
Catalan have been followed. Proper nouns (first names only) are written
in the language of the country of origin of the person, except in the
case of popes, kings or royal families. For example:
Plaça de Pablo Neruda
Carrer de Jacinto Benavente
Carrer de Louis Braille
Passeig de Joan de Borbó, comte de Barcelona
Plaça de Joan Carles I
Carrer de Pelai
A surname that corresponds to a definite person must be distinguished
from a surname that corresponds to a family or lineage. If the road plaques
which display the name approved at that time do not define or determine
the individual concerned, the surname on the plaque can be considered
to identify a lineage. We must take into account that until later investigations
were carried out in the composition of this work, the origin of many of
these surnames were unknown. It is therefore impossible to attribute the
dedication of a street name to one particular individual.
If the surnames keep their traditional spelling, although it may be spelt
incorrectly, when the anthroponym does not correspond to a definite person
of a definite lineage, it becomes a generic surname. If this surname has
the root of a common name (and not a proper one) which, at that time,
would have given a name to the current corrupted surname and if, furthermore,
this anthroponym becomes a toponym, it may be normalised in accordance
with Law 7/1983 of 18th April, (linguistic normalisation*) and Decree
78/1991 of 8th April (the use of place-names which affects the naming
of city and intercity roads). An example is the case of the Plaça de
la Teixonera, which appears in the Nomenclàtor 1980. The placement
of the preposition 'de' and the 'la' in front of the name
indicates that the dedication is not to a definite person but instead
comes from the name by which the place is known. In this case the normalisation
is correct. If it was meant to have been to Sr Taxonera, the owner of
the land, it would have been plaça 'de ' or 'd'En'
Taxonera or, 'd'En Joaquim Taxonera i Cassa', who bought the land
at the beginning of the century, or better still, plaça 'de
la Colonia Taxonera', which is an exact reference to that colonia.
In the end, the name of the square was corrected at the request of the
family. We must take into account that in this Diccionari Nomenclàtor
names have been kept as they were when they were approved, even though
we now know to whom they refer, individuals whose forename and surname
feature in the biographical section. In any case, it would fall to the
City Council to correct the name of a street, if it was appropriate and
if the Council wanted to reconsider its normalisation.
*governmental process by which Catalan replaced Castillian Spanish as
the official language of Catalonia.
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Need for and justification
of this publication
Despite the many studies published about the origin of the street names
of Barcelona, in many cases the investigation did not get to the bottom
of the aforementioned origin. However, the City Council must be able to
inform, justify to and satisfy the curiosity of the residents of the city
with respect to the events or the people that gave names to the streets,
without exception. Every effort has been made to avoid contradictory or
erroneous versions vis-à-vis different interpretations given to
the street names that form a small part of the history of the city.
Therefore, the plaque of a public street can not be maintained if the
reason for or the person behind the dedication is unknown. Naturally the
medieval names of the Ciutat Vella are an exception as legends
and popular versions collected by historians survive over the true origin
of the dedication. Indeed, they have become part of a collection of stories.
By compiling all that has already been published and taking the official
publication of Nomenclàtor 1980 de les Vies Publiques de Barcelona
as a base, it is possible to prove that some street names which are dedicated
to alleged landowners in the last two hundred years lack definition. The
main part of the work, therefore, is based on discovering the fore and
surnames of those people and placing them in their time and place.
This work aims to be a more defined and more accurate continuation of
the investigations commissioned by the City Council and carried out at
different times. Naturally the starting point of this work is the 1980
dictionary and its subsequent revisions. Therefore, an important part
of this dictionary is made up from the files of names composed then by
Sr Ponseti. For many years, these files have become the source of information
to the general public interested in how the city's streets are named.
They have been the key to the work and have been consulted by the Ponència
and other municipal services.
In order to complete the unabridged publication of these files exhaustive
revision has been undertaken including checking, filling in and modification
where necessary of the information contained in the original files. No
further revision has been done since 1986 when the most important part
of the work was completed and closed.
Care has been taken to remain faithful to the original work, as it deserves
preservation out of respect for the efforts of the researchers and historians
who worked on it for so many years.
The unpublished part of this dictionary stands out because part of the
aforementioned files does not clearly define the true origins of certain
street names. In some cases the version put forward until now was totally
contradictory to the version that we now consider to be the most correct
having consulted original documentation.
One of the challenges was identifying the people who in the nineteenth
century and at the beginning of the twentieth century contributed to the
expansion of Barcelona and the incorporated towns. We refer to the landowners,
the promoters of the new residential developments which were carried out
during this historically important period. Until now, it has been supposed
that, in certain situations, the name of the road was dedicated to the
landowner who gave up part of his lands so that the road could be constructed.
But in many cases we do not know whether this really is the correct version.
Even if it is, the identity of the person is unknown. Thus over time the
history of these names has been diluted and lost.
In this dictionary of names you will find results that are not exhaustive.
It is presented as a dictionary not an encyclopaedia. In some cases the
stories hidden behind the names are presented in a summarised form. In
others we find simply the name and surname of the person who gave the
street its name. We can be certain, however, that in the latter cases
there is a story hidden behind the name. Many of these stories could be
the subject of a more extensive monograph, but the principle aim of the
dictionary, as has already been said, is not to be an encyclopaedia or
a collection of individual stories. We consider it most important to have
achieved our goal with this publication. It is very satisfying if, for
example, an entry until now has stated 'reason for denomination unknown'
and we have discovered that reason.
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Systems of documentation
The name of each street is highlighted in bold. Following this is the
most official and historically accurate version of the road's dedication.
When it is a question of an individual person, the biographical note is
a summary of the information found in the Gran Enciclopedia Catalana,
The Espasa Encyclopaedia or other specific biographical sources
After the biographical-historical section, we find the most important
documentary references which have been extracted from initial documentation.
The reference to the GEC is excluded because it is a constant throughout
the book. Also excluded in many cases are references to the ACA (Archives
of the Crown of Aragon) as documentation provided by the Registre de
la Propietat (Land Registry) is more expansive and all that the ACA
does is ratify it.
Even following documentary guidelines we have been allowed to introduce
some slight modifications to the guidelines to which we are trying to
adhere.
Documentary references begin with the symbol { instead of the normal classical
parenthesis. We do not consider this to be a significant detail. This
modification means that the final biographical part can be identified
by the computer programme at the IMI Centre de Cartografia Automatica
which is used in the naming of streets. Given that the biographical part
uses, in certain cases, parenthesis between details or dates in the biographical
part itself, it seems logical to indicate the end with the {.
Thus, a documentary reference could be reflected in the following way:
{PC:MPV,fn;AMAB:en,C14}. Its meaning is as follows:
PC: Map of the City, the place where the information consulted
can be found
MPV Miquel Ponseti Vives, author of the biography described
fn file name
; separation between references
AMAB Administrative Municipal Archives of Barcelona, place where
the information consulted can be found
en report on name, series in which the classification can be found
c14 Box number 14
After the documentary reference, the date of the approval of the street
is found on a separate line, if it is known, or the year/century from
which details of the existence of the current street name date. The date
12/06/1980 corresponds to its normalisation. Below this information the
street's previous names are found with an approximate indication of the
year in which they came into use.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to:
All the organisations, archives and municipal services that made this
research project possible, and especially to:
- Arxius de Districte (Borough Archives)
- Institut Municipal d'Informàtica (Municipal Institute of IT), Centre de Cartografia Automàtica (Centre of Automatic Cartography)
- Assemblea Territorial dels Registradors de la Propietat i Mercantils de Catalunya (Assembly of Land and Business Registries of Catalonia)
- Registre Civil de Barcelona (Civil Registry of Barcelona)
- Arxiu de la Corona d'Aragó (Archive of the Crown of Aragon)
- Arxiu Capitular de Barcelona (Chapter Archives of Barcelona)
- Arxiu Diocesà de Barcelona (Diocesan Archives of Barcelona)
- Arxiu Històric de Protocols de Barcelona (Historical Archives of Protocol of Barcelona)
- Arxiu del Monestir de Pedralbes (Archives of the Monastery of Pedralbes)
- Arxiu Municipal Administratiu (Municipal Administrative Archives)
- Arxiu Històric (Historical Archives)
- Departament d'Informació i Documentació (Department of Information and Documentation)
- Negociat de Població (Department of Population)
- Private archives and centres of Catalunya
- Sr Colomer, de l'Arxiu Parroquial de Malgrat (Parish Archives of Malgrat)
- Sr Miquel Ponsetí Vives
- Sr Josep Moran i Ocerinjauregui
- Sr Josep M. Huertas
- Sr Lluís Permanyer
The persons who have impartially participated in the creation
of this work and in particular to the relatives of those people featured
in the dictionary, for their help.
Researcher and Compiler
Jesús Portavella
Doctor of Architecture
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Barcelona City Council |