Explore Barcelona in Google Street View

Barcelona has the most distinctive street plan of any city you can explore virtually, and you notice it within seconds. The Eixample district is a grid, which is common enough, but every single block has its corners cut off at forty five degrees. Ildefons Cerdà designed it that way in 1859 so that carriages could turn and so that every junction would open into a small octagonal square. Switch to satellite and the pattern is unmistakable. Drop into Street View and every crossing feels wider than it should.

The contrast with the Gothic Quarter is total and it happens at one street. Cross Via Laietana and the grid stops, the light drops, and you are in lanes that were laid out inside Roman walls. Some of them are barely two metres wide, and the camera went through on foot. Carrer del Bisbe with its neo-Gothic bridge is the postcard, but the interesting parts are the ones with no name you recognise.

Gaudí is the reason most people come, virtually or otherwise, and the buildings hold up on a screen better than most architecture does. The Sagrada Família is best circled rather than viewed head on, because the two completed facades were built seventy years apart in completely different styles, and seeing them in sequence makes the point better than any photograph. Casa Batlló and La Pedrera sit on the same avenue a short walk apart, so you can compare them without leaving Passeig de Gràcia.

Park Güell is on a hill above the city and was captured on foot, which matters because the whole design is about levels. The terrace with the serpentine bench looks out over the entire city to the sea, and the columned hall underneath it holds the terrace up. Moving between the two virtually gives you the structural logic in a way that ground-level photographs never do.

For the everyday city, follow the Barceloneta grid down to the beach. It was built in the eighteenth century for people displaced by a fortress, on a strict small grid of narrow blocks, and it still feels separate from everything around it. The beach itself only exists in its current form because the whole waterfront was rebuilt for the 1992 Olympics, which is recent enough that older residents remember industry where the sand is.

One thing to look out for. Barcelona has been photographed several times over the years and the imagery is dated in the interface, so you can sometimes step back through previous captures and watch the Sagrada Família's towers grow. It is one of the few places where the historical layer of Street View shows a building actually under construction across more than a decade.