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At the beginning of my interest in knowing the ancient elements of Barcelona, one day I was walking through Plaza España and it occurred to me to ask several passersby if they knew why that street was called Cruz Covered. Everyone treated me kindly, but no one knew how to tell me the reason for the name of this road.
No one knew how to tell me the relationship that the name could have with any real-life event or situation, only someone related it to a religious topic.
Possibly, what surprised me greatly at that time, today I would take as a normal thing, because of how much we run at the moment and how little we spend looking back.
I started researching the history of the place and came across several basic concepts.
Cross formerly placed at the entrance to cities or towns.
Term cross covered with a transept, located at the entrance of an important municipal district marking the limit between two adjacent districts. They began to be built in the 14th century.
The terminus cross is mentioned in stories in the 14th century. In the 15th century, we find it relating to a cross located on the Coll de la Creu, one of the places where prisoners sentenced to death were executed at that time.
It was said that in said place they found the hanging body of some prisoners sentenced to death. In 1573, Pere Ferré built a new one, upon verifying that the existing one was in poor condition.
In the middle of the 19th century, the city of Barcelona, although it had a larger territory than the one in which it was enclosed within the wall, when it was demolished its perimeter was checked and a cross was placed on the roads and highways, as a sign of the end of one municipality and the beginning of another.
Barcelona had not yet annexed any of the neighboring towns that surrounded it and the cross was located approximately in the current center of Plaza España.
Whether by chance or consciously, the city council authorities at the time of reforming the Odominia of the city of Barcelona decided to name the street as Covered Cross.
Before its current nomination, the place was known as Camino de Madrid, Camino Real, Antiguo Camino de la Cruz Covered, Camino del Portal de San Antonio, Camino Antiguo del Portal de San Antonio and, finally, the Odominia of the city converted it definitely on Cruz Covered Street (Creu Coberta).
Among the lost memories of the street is the disappearance of the Pollets house, considered the oldest in the neighborhood, whose demolition served to lengthen Diputación street.
Joan Corrades Bosch bought the land in 1840 and built a hostel. Els Traginers, well known, because most travelers spent the night there, once the gates of the walls of Barcelona were closed at night.
The House of Mossèn Pere, at 214 Calle de Sants. Mossèn Pere dedicated his life and his house to working for the socially marginalized.
This is the small story of a street that has become a place for residents to walk and find an infinite number of shops necessary to not have the need to travel outside the neighborhood.
A Municipal Market, the offices of the District Council and although it retains fairly dense traffic, with the express routes out of the city Gran Vía and Diagonal, it has lost the prominence of having once been a main road.
The street in its names, Cruz Covered and its continuation Carretera de Sants, is one of the most commercial in Barcelona,
