Let’s start with the name — Font de Canaletes. Sounds poetic, right? But its roots go back to the 14th century, when Barcelona was still squeezed inside its medieval walls. At the time, the Rambla wasn’t the bustling boulevard we know today — it was actually a sewage stream! To bring fresh water into the city, engineers built aqueducts to channel it from the Collserola mountains and the Besòs River. These aqueducts connected to a network of pipes and tanks that helped supply water all the way from Porta de l’Àngel to what we now call Plaça Catalunya. That system passed through a gate called Portal de Sant Sever, which had towers nicknamed the Torres de Canaletes. Why Canaletes? In Catalan, it means “little canals,” a reference to the network of small channels that once carried water beneath the towers in this area.