Barcelona 15 – The Skewed Map

Here’s a map of Barcelona in the 1920s.

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This map assumes you know that north is not at the top, where the mountains reach the horizon.  North is 45 degrees off centre, in the direction of the red dotted line.  That is a major street called, appropriately, The Meridian – which actually does run north-south.

The downtown peninsula of Vancouver is also skewed 45 degrees to north – but that doesn’t stop us from calling the residential area the West End, not the Northwest End.  Same, more or less, in Barcelona.

Here is what it looks like with north at the top, and the major districts identified.

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My mental map of Barcelona is of a broad strip of dense low-rise development, with a few towers and a big green hill called Montjuic, filling in the coastal plane up to the ridge of mountains about six kilometres inland.

That Barcelona looks like this:

Click to enlarge.