Barcelona, Spain: Plaça de Mossèn Jacint Verdaguer

Diagonal Street is the biggest boulevard in Barcelona, running northwest to southeast on the grid. Every so often some sort of monument pops up along the way, and this one is a big one. Give a warm greeting to Plaça de Mossèn Jacint Verdaguer. 

This is a mighty big monument, so it must have been built in tribute to someone important. A politician? Business leader? Military hero? No, no and no. The winner is Jacint Verdaguer, and he is a poet.

Verdaguer is considered to be one of the greatest poets in the Catalan language, and was a key figure in the Romantic movement of the late 1800s. A bishop crowned him as the "Poet of Catalana" in 1886. Verdaguer was buried in a Barcelona Cemetery. One of the many honors he received was to have his image placed on a 500 pesetas banknote in Spain in 1971.

As for the monument, it contains scenes of some of the poet's work. Incidentally, the name of the square was changed in 1980 from the Spanish language to the Catalan language.