Symposium Venues

Locations

Symposium Venues

At the end of the 14th century King Martin the Humane made a first attempt to provide Barcelona with a Studium Generale, as the leading seats of learning were known in the Middle Ages. But failing to win over the city’s Consell de Cent (the Council of One Hundred), the monarch could only endow the city with a Studium of Medicine, which he founded in 1401. It would not be until half a century later, in 1450, that King Alphonse the Magnanimous granted a charter for the establishment of a Studium Generale in Barcelona, which served to unify the city’s existing seats of learning.

In 1536, during the reign of Charles I of Spain, work began on a building to house the Studium Generale. It was erected at the top end of the Rambla and to this day this stretch of the street bears the name Rambla dels Estudis. The University remained at this site until 1714, the year in which Philip V promulgated the Nueva Planta decrees ordering the transferral of the Faculties of Philosophy and Canon and Secular Law to the town of Cervera near Lleida.

The doors of the University of Cervera remained open from 1717 to 1837, the year in which the University was restored to its home in Barcelona, where it was provisionally housed in the Convent of Carme and in the city’s Royal Academy of Medicine.

On 22 October 1863 the first stone was laid for a new building designed by the architect Elies Rogent for the University of Barcelona. The building was to have a great impact on the city’s urban development, since it was one of the first structures to be raised outside Barcelona’s ancient walls. Although the building was not to be completed for another twenty years, the first lectures were already being given in 1871.