Origins of peculiar metro station names in Barcelona

Clot… Gorg… Congrés… Lesseps… 

If you’ve ever taken public transport in Barcelona, you may have wondered about the peculiar names that some of the metro stations have. 

Some station names are obvious, especially when they’re located in a major square like Plaça Catalunya and Plaça Espanya, or if they are the main station for a particular neighborhood, like Poble Sec or Barceloneta. 

Yet many of the districts or neighborhoods that lend their name to metro stations also have strange or unexpected origins. Some metro stations are even named after certain places, or even urban or geographical features, that no longer exist.

Commuting home from work on the metro some 20 years ago in an era before mobile phone distractions, Marta Torres’s curiosity was stoked thinking about how these stations she grew up with got their names. She channeled these questions in her own head into research for a book, Barcelona: Metro a Metro, and shared some of the stories from her research in an interview with Catalan News. 

 

📍 Clot

In Catalan, clot means something like a ‘hollow’ or a ‘hole’. In medieval times, this area, far from being enveloped by the sprawling city, was known as Clotum Melis, which means ‘honey hole.’ In the Middle Ages, this area was forest and countryside, and particularly popular for bees, allowing Barcelona residents to collect honey. 

📍 Congrés

Laws are passed in the Spanish Congress in Madrid, and the tech world flocks to Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress each February, but what’s behind the metro station name Congrés? The 35th International Eucharistic Congress, during the height of Francoism, in 1952, which drew leaders from 80 countries to Catalonia.

📍 Rocafort

Though it could be interpreted as ‘hard rock’, there is no such known geographical feature in this area in times gone past. Instead, there are many streets in Eixample that owe their name to the writer and politician Víctor Balaguer, who was commissioned by the city council to name new streets as the city expanded beyond its historic walls. Balaguer found inspiration in historic Catalan characters, institutions, and events, especially from the times of the Crown of Aragon. Bernat de Rocafort was a 13th century knight who was Roger de Flor's lieutenant and later his successor at the head of the Almogàvers. At one point in his life, he had another famous knight as his rival, Berenguer d'Entença, and today, the stations of Rocafort and Entença are next to each other.

📍 Encants 

This name seems obvious – ‘encants’ means ‘charms’, and it’s named for the huge market which dates back to the 14th century where buyers will find such delights. Right? Wrong. The name is actually derived from the French ‘d’enquant?’, meaning ‘how much?’

📍 La Pau

In the past, the area of La Pau, which translates to The Peace, was just farmland. The neighborhood of La Pau was built to provide extra housing, and Franco himself inaugurated the new Barcelona suburb in 1966 as part of a series of events to celebrate what they termed ‘25 years of peace’, marking the end of the civil war. 

📍 Lesseps

Question: What links the Suez Canal and the Barcelona neighborhood of Gràcia? Answer: Ferdinand de Lesseps. The French diplomat was a consul in the city around 1845 and the square where he lived was given his name, some years before he developed the connection between the Mediterranean and Red Seas.

📍 Gorg

‘Gorg’ in Catalan means something akin to a small waterfall, but while there is plenty of natural beauty to be found in Badalona, waterfalls are one thing that do not feature in the landscape. This is a good example of a neighborhood getting its name from historical natural elements and then passing it on to the metro stop. In centuries gone by, the river Besós created many small gorges and waterfalls throughout the area just north of Barcelona, now lost to urban sprawl.

📍 Fontana

If you’re thirsty, it won’t be hard to find some bars and restaurants around Gràcia, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a fountain in Fontana. But in the past century, this area provided quality drinking water from a fountain in a garden. The fountain’s no longer there, but the name remains. 

📍 Drassanes

Drassanes is Catalan for ‘shipyards’, and the 13th-century building that now hosts the Maritime Museum was once a site where vessels that would explore the seas and oceans of the world were built.

📍 Camp de l’Arpa

The metro station Camp de l’Arpa gets its name from the neighborhood where it’s located, yet the place name is also one of the most peculiar neighborhood names in Barcelona. It’s believed that the name is a deformation of “Camp de l’Arca,” which referred to an ark or dolmen that was in this area and that appears cited in a document from 1037, where it is spoken of as “ad ipsa archa” (“place where that ark is”).

📍 La Sagrera

The station is named after the neighborhood. In the Middle Ages, 'sagreres' were sacred spaces around churches where farmers could take refuge from the violence of feudal lords. La Sagrera in Barcelona was the protective space around the church of Sant Martí de Provençals.

📍 Vall d’Hebron

The station and the hospital complex are named after the neighborhood in the Horta-Guinardó district. Historically, this territory had been part of the now-defunct monastery of Sant Jeroni de la Vall d’Hebron, founded in 1393. The hermits who had lived there before possibly gave it the name Vall d’Hebron in honor of the valley in Palestine.