Gràcia: the village that resists the grid
The squares, the bell tower, the car-light streets, and Gaudí's first house at the edge. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Casa Vicens
Gaudí's first house, on a narrow corner where the *barri* (neighbourhood) thins out. Tiled green and ochre, more Moorish than the Sagrada Família crowd expects. You can go in, but the façade does most of the work — start here and walk into the grid that never quite happened.

2. Plaça de la Virreina
A *plaça* (square) most locals still call Plaça de Sant Joan, after the 1884 church that sits at one end. Low worker's houses on one side, café terraces under the plane trees. Take a coffee and watch the four little streets feed into it.

3. Plaça del Sol
The one everyone means when they say they're meeting in Gràcia. Bare and sun-trapped by day, full by night. Come mid-afternoon for the in-between hour, when the terraces are unhurried and the square is yours.

4. Carrer de Verdi
The shopping spine — independent bookshops, a single-screen cinema, ceramics, secondhand. Walk it slowly; it's the street that proves Gràcia still makes its own decisions.

5. Plaça de la Vila de Gràcia
The civic heart, and the bell tower — the *Torre del Rellotge*, the thirty-metre clock tower that once rallied the village against the city. Sit at the base. This is the square that explains why Gràcia behaves like a town that got swallowed but never agreed to it.

6. Joanic (L4)
Drop down the eastern edge to the metro, past the kind of corner *plaça* you'll wish your own city had. One stop and you're back in the grid Gràcia spent a century refusing.

Gràcia: the village that resists the grid