Eixample
Cerdà's Eixample: the chamfered grid that turned the plain into a dense bourgeois city.
The Eixample is the nineteenth-century extension planned by Ildefons Cerdà after the walls fell. Its six barris record status gradients (Dreta/Esquerra), monument tourism (Sagrada Família), market culture (Sant Antoni) and the western industrial edge. Superilles experiments now rewrite street space without erasing the grid. The district groups 6 neighbourhoods with a combined registered population of about 277,353 (padró 2026). The comparative table uses the same definitions and years for every barri. Internal inequalities — income, density, tourism, self-built or Eixample histories — are best read neighbourhood by neighbourhood. Each has its own page with sources.
Plan of Barcelona shortly before Cerdà’s Eixample (1858).
Wikimedia Commons · Miquel Garriga i Roca · CC BY 4.0 · source
Plan of Barcelona and its surroundings around 1890, with the Eixample expanding.
Wikimedia Commons · public domain · source
Neighbourhood directory
| Neighbourhood | Population | Density | Income (section mean) |
|---|---|---|---|
| el Fort Pienc | 37,672 | 405.5 | 27,241 |
| la Sagrada Família | 53,201 | 510.6 | 25,915 |
| la Dreta de l'Eixample | 45,464 | 214.5 | 35,332 |
| l'Antiga Esquerra de l'Eixample | 42,921 | 349.5 | 32,767 |
| la Nova Esquerra de l'Eixample | 59,117 | 440.8 | 29,378 |
| Sant Antoni | 38,978 | 484.8 | 26,589 |
- el Fort Pienc — The eastern Eixample where Cerdà’s grid meets military memory, railway lines, a former station, cultural institutions and an inner civic square: a dense neighbourhood that looks regular on the map but has been shaped by large infrastructure.
- la Sagrada Família — An Eixample neighbourhood named for the monument that has kept it under construction for generations: Sagrada Família rises inside a residential city of market, schools, shops and homes, while the visitor perimeter transforms streets that once belonged to El Poblet.
- la Dreta de l'Eixample — The part of the Eixample that the bourgeoisie turned into a showcase, but also a neighbourhood of low passages, markets, concierges’ lodges, offices, schools and block interiors: Cerdà’s grid read as a machine for prestige, business and ordinary life.
- l'Antiga Esquerra de l'Eixample — A part of the Eixample where the residential grid becomes a medical campus, market, school, clinic, queer space, commercial street and home every day: a neighbourhood defined as much by those who arrive for care, study and work as by those who live here.
- la Nova Esquerra de l'Eixample — The western Eixample where a factory became a campus, a prison a memory site and an abattoir a park: a later and denser grid shaped by industry, technical education, control, rail movement and housing.
- Sant Antoni — An iron market built over the edge of the walls that still organises food, clothes, used goods, books, encounter and conflict: Sant Antoni is a compact Eixample neighbourhood where commercial infrastructure and street redesign have remade local identity.