Displaced Origins: The First Synagogue

Rising dramatically at the top of the street is the fifteenth-century Gothic Pia Almoina building alongside the grand seventeenth-century Baroque cathedral staircase. Earliest records indicate that Jewish families settled around this elevated slope near the upper city walls in the late ninth century. The community's first documented synagogue operated in this high zone. However, as the Girona Cathedral chapter expanded its authority, canonries, and physical precinct between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, Jewish communal institutions were gradually displaced downhill toward lower Carrer de la Força. This shift demonstrates how urban expansion and religious authority directly reshaped the physical boundaries of the medieval neighbourhood long before formal ghettoization occurred.