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The short history of the missing Pont de la Parra passage, very unknown to many, dates back to between 1887 and 1912, at a time when Barcelona’s urban planners lived locked up in their studios and trying to remodel a city that had lived confined within some walls and that he wanted to get out of there.
The Pont de la Parra passage was the first attempt at opening or, as we could say, the appetizer of the construction of what we know today as Via Laietana.
The project of the future Via Laietana was realized through three designs developed urbanistically by the architects Lluís Domènech i Montaner, Josep Puig i Cadafalch and Ferran Romeu i Ribot.
The first, carried out between 1908-1909 by Lluís Domènech i Montaner, initially dedicated to the Queen Regent, coincided with the area closest to the port between Plaza de Antonio López and Plaza del Ángel.
The second, built between 1909-1911 by Josep Puig i Cadafalch, was located between Plaza del Àngel and Calle de Sant Pere Més Baix, on the old passage of Pont de la Parra.
The third and last, built between 1911-1913 by Ferran Romeu i Ribot, extended between Plaza Urquinaona and Plaza de Jonqueres and, at first, was named Bilbao Street.
With the project of opening the Via Laietana, several people began to emigrate to new settlements and, among them, in 1851, the convent of San Juan de Jerusalem, with the dissolution of the order in Spain.
In 1886 the convent was demolished and the resulting land was used to build the first buildings that were built in the area. They followed the alignment of the project for the future Via Laietana, with ground-floor and five-story buildings, in an approximate space of 100 meters that was baptized as the Pont de la Parra passage.
These movements were the cause of the birth of the missing passage known as the Pont de la Parra that went from Mercaders Street to the Riera de San Juan in the direction of Besòs-Llobregat.
The passage was built in 1887 and remained until 1912, when it took the official name of Via Laietana. Despite its short life, the passage had great activity, since if we look at the advertisements of companies and official centers in the archives of the newspapers of the time, we will see its ability to generate news.
With the inauguration of the Gran Via Laietana, the Pont de la Parra disappeared and most of the primitive buildings built at the beginning disappeared for new ones, in line with the new, much more ostentatious constructions that were built from then on.
Of the old buildings built at that time, only a few built on the sidewalk on the Besòs side remain.
Today, the existence of the Pont de la Parra only remains for history and newspaper archives, as a testimony to a time when the walled city of Barcelona struggled to escape its ancestral confinement.
