The Gothic Quarter sits atop four distinct civilizations, each layer visible in the stonework. Roman columns support medieval arches; fourteenth-century facades conceal Visigothic foundations; plaças paved in 1823 rest on first-century forum floors. The neighborhood earned its name not from the Middle Ages but from the nineteenth-century Renaixença, when Catalan architects rediscovered the district's concentration of Catalan Gothic buildings and began systematic restoration. Barcelona walking tours gòtic reveal a district that was never planned as a coherent whole. The Roman colony of Barcino occupied fifteen hectares behind six-meter walls, portions of which still stand along Carrer del Call and beneath Plaça del Rei. The medieval city expanded in concentric rings, each century adding chapels, guildhalls, and aristocratic palaces without erasing what came before. By 1400, Barcelona was the capital of a Mediterranean empire stretching to Athens, and the Gothic Quarter—then simply the city center—housed the Consell de Cent, the representative assembly that governed Catalonia for five centuries. The Saló del Tinell, a vast fourteenth-century hall with stone arches spanning seventeen meters without intermediate support, served as the throne room where Ferdinand and Isabella received Columbus in 1493. Today the Barri Gòtic remains Barcelona's administrative and ceremonial heart. The Generalitat de Catalunya, Catalonia's government, occupies a fifteenth-century palace on Carrer del Bisbe. The Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia, begun in 1298 and completed in 1420, anchors the district's northern edge; its cloister shelters thirteen white geese, one for each year of the child martyr Eulalia's life. Carrer del Bisbe, the Gothic Quarter's most photographed street, displays a neo-Gothic bridge added in 1928—a replica of Venice's Bridge of Sighs, built for the International Exposition. The district's two thousand years are compressed into sixty-eight hectares. Plaça Sant Jaume, the Roman forum, now separates the Palau de la Generalitat from the Casa de la Ciutat, Barcelona's city hall. The Jewish Quarter, El Call, occupies the blocks southwest of the cathedral; Hebrew inscriptions remain embedded in Carrer de Sant Domènec del Call. Carrer Montcada, the medieval road to the port, became the address of merchant palaces in the thirteenth century. Gothic Quarter barcelona tour itineraries cross these layers in two hours, but the district rewards slower observation—the Roman aqueduct under Plaça Nova, the fifteenth-century hospital on Carrer de l'Hospital, the medieval fountain in Plaça Sant Felip Neri, untouched since the Spanish Civil War.