The paving design of La Rambla's central promenade appears to ripple like water, an acknowledgment of what flows beneath the surface. The street is actually a series of shorter segments, each with its own name -- hence the plural form Les Rambles in Catalan, or Las Ramblas in Spanish. Over the centuries, religious establishments lined its length: the Jesuit Bethlehem monastery and college, founded in 1553; the Carmelite St. Joseph's monastery, whose site now holds the Boqueria market; and a Capuchin monastery at the street's lower end. During the St. James's Night riots of 1835, revolutionaries burned these monasteries and churches and killed a number of friars. The Spanish Civil War brought further destruction when anarchists controlled Barcelona and again targeted religious buildings, while pro-Franco artillery and air attacks damaged the surrounding area.

In the late nineteenth century, Catalans who had made fortunes from slave plantations in Spanish America returned to Barcelona after the abolition of slavery in 1886. Several invested their wealth in constructing opulent mansions along La Rambla and in neighboring streets. German historian Michael Zeuske has argued that the boulevard was "built on the backs of slaves," a claim The Guardian characterized as an exaggeration but one that reflects an uncomfortable truth about the sources of the wealth that shaped the street's architecture. The grand facades that visitors admire today were, in many cases, financed by the labor of enslaved people thousands of miles away in Cuba and other Caribbean colonies. Barcelona is increasingly reckoning with this history, which complicates the picturesque narrative of a beloved promenade.

Walking La Rambla today, you pass flower kiosks that have been selling blooms from the same spots for generations, newspaper stands, and pavement cafes where the price of a coffee includes unlimited people-watching. Near the Pla de l'Os, a circular pavement mosaic by Joan Miro, installed in 1976, decorates the ground beneath thousands of passing feet. The Font de Canaletes, a fountain and legendary meeting point, sits near the top of the street -- tradition holds that anyone who drinks from it will return to Barcelona. Along the way stand the Palau de la Virreina, a Baroque palace hosting exhibitions, and the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona's opera house since 1847. Until 2010, the Rambla dels Estudis hosted an open-air market for caged birds and small animals, a tradition ended by animal protection legislation after years of legal disputes.

On 17 August 2017, a van was deliberately driven into pedestrians on La Rambla, killing fourteen people and injuring over one hundred thirty in a terrorist attack. The boulevard has absorbed this trauma as it has absorbed every other upheaval in its history -- the medieval floods, the anticlerical fires, the civil war bombardments, the decades of Franco-era repression. In 2017, Barcelona approved a redevelopment plan for the street with an estimated budget of forty-five million euros, intended to reduce car traffic, expand pedestrian space, and create more green areas. The ambition is to make La Rambla more welcoming to the residents who live along it, not just the tourists who pass through. It is a street that has been continuously reinvented for six centuries, and the reinvention continues -- built on sand, shaped by water, defined by the people who walk it.