Plaça de Sant Felip Neri, Barcelona

Plaça de Sant Felip Neri is a small square gathered around the Baroque Church of Saint Philip Neri, with the Oratory’s house attached to it. The octagonal fountain at the heart of the square is dedicated as a symbol of life, a striking presence among reconstructed Renaissance façades belonging to former guild houses. The church façade still carries the scars of the bombing that struck this place during the Spanish Civil War.

On the thirtieth of January 1938, an aircraft attack caused 42 deaths, most of them children sheltering in the church basement; nearby houses were destroyed as well. Adolf Florensa i Ferrer led the reconstruction, incorporating façades moved from buildings dismantled elsewhere in Barcelona. The square’s history reaches further back: this ground served as a cathedral cemetery, including burials of people executed by hanging or dismemberment, which gave it the grim nickname cemetery of the condemned.

It became known as Fossar de Natzaret in the seventeenth century and was closed as a cemetery in 1816. Archaeological work in 2009 recorded a medieval street wall beneath the square, offering a physical trace of the urban fabric that existed before the church and convent reshaped this place.