Via Laietana is the street that separates the neighborhoods of El Gòtic and La Ribera (or El Born). Its name comes from the Neolithic tribe of the Laietans, who were the first known inhabitants of the area where Barcelona is now.
La Via Laietana was built around 1910 to join the new city (the Eixample district) with the port, without having to go through the narrow streets of the old city. You will see that the street is wide and totally straight, very different from the rest of the old city.
To build it, hundreds of houses were destroyed and almost 10,000 families lost their homes. One of the affected houses was moved to Plaça Sant Felip Neri and now it is our children’s school.
Via Laietana is an unpleasant place to walk, basically because of the number of cars and the noise they generate. But if you look at the buildings, there are some really nice ones from the beginning of the 20th century.
If you start the walk from the marina, first you will find the main post office (Plaça Antonio Lopez), where you can enter quietly during office hours. It is spectacular, now no one would spend all this space and money to do a post office. There are still the original windows and also some posters.
If you go up you will pass by the Ramon Berenguer square, where you can see a piece of the Roman wall of the 1st century, and above it the church of Santa Agata and the royal palace seen from behind (yes, you are seeing the Plaça del Rei from behind) . If you look, the Roman wall was used as a base for these medieval buildings.
Further up, when you arrive at Plaça Urquinaona, you have an old bank office (Via Laietana 64). You can enter a moment and imagine how the banks were 100 years ago.
This can be a different way of doing tourism in the old city, and without so many people around you.