Reconstructing a City’s Evolving Physical Environment Through Its Hydronymy: Barcelona as a Case Study

Current research on the urban growth of Barcelona emphasizes the relevance of its physical environment and, in particular, of its hydrographic network, in the construction, development and transformation of this Catalan city. Barcelona’s hydrography can be considered a paradigm of the “Mediterranean city”: that is, an urban core in which physical environmental factors, above all those related to water (i.e., a coastal site influenced by a series of regionally significant river courses and an internal drainage dependent on a network, in the case of Catalonia, of rieras and torrents—ephemeral gully streams), have been fundamental in its growth. In this framework, we conduct a study of social perceptions of the importance of the “hydrographic environment” in the configuration of the city, focusing our analysis on the thematic thread provided by the city’s hydronymy (that is, the names given to these streams and rivers).