Barcelona is one my favorite cities in the world. I love the intimate laneways in the old part of town. I love how La Rambla functions as a spine for public life in the city–even if it is pretty touristy. I love the weather and beaches. And I love that there’s a strong culture of art and design that seems to permeate all aspects of the city. 

Over the weekend I found an impressive website called BIG TIME BCN, that beautifully maps out the city’s more than 2,000 years of building. It covers over 70,000 plots of land and, if you hover of them, it’ll tell you the age of the buildings. It’s similar to what was done here for the Netherlands. But the colors on this one seem very Barcelona to me.

There are apparently 9,866,539 buildings in all of the Netherlands. And Waag.org has just plotted them all on a map and colour coded them based on the year of their construction (via Information Aesthetics).

Here’s what Amsterdam looks like:

As to be expected, you can see how the city grew out from its historic core. What would it make the map even better though, is if you could turn off “layers” and see each time period in isolation.

If you’re interested in this sort of thing, here’s a similar map of Portland.