The Four Columns ("Les Quatre Columnes" in Catalan) are four Ionic columns originally created by Josep Puig i Cadafalch in Barcelona, Catalonia. They were erected in 1919, where the Magic Fountain of Montjuïc now stands.
They symbolized the four stripes of the Catalan senyera, and they were intended to become one of the main icons of Catalanism. Because of this, they were demolished in 1928 during Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, when all public Catalanist symbols were systematically removed in order to avoid their being noticed during the 1929 Universal Exposition, which was to take place on Montjuïc.
Moreover, because of these same political motives, Poble Espanyol (Spanish Village in Catalan), on the same hill, was the name given to the open-air museum formerly to be named Iberona — in homage to the Iberians, the first inhabitants of what is now Catalonia. Analogously for the nearby Plaça d'Espanya.
In 1999, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) erected four similar columns on its Bellaterra Campus.
Read more about The Four Columns: Re-erection, External Links
Famous quotes containing the word columns:
“A few more days, and this essay will follow the Defensio Populi to the dust and silence of the upper shelf.... For a month or two it will occupy a few minutes of chat in every drawing-room, and a few columns in every magazine; and it will then ... be withdrawn, to make room for the forthcoming novelties.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)