Meridian Avenue and Sant Andreu Arenal train station

Introduction:
In the midst of the French Revolution, in 1791, due to the great variety of measures being used and the confusion this often caused, the Academy of Sciences of Paris proposed a measure based on nature. The basic unit of linear measures would be called the meter, and it would be equivalent to one ten-millionth of the quarter of the Earth's meridian. The meridian passing through Paris was chosen and it was decided to measure the arc between Dunkirk (Northern France) and Barcelona, with an approximate size of 9.5º.

Content:
The geodesists Pierre François André Méchain and Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre were responsible for measuring the meridian. Delambre handled the part from Dunkirk to Rodez, and from there to Barcelona was Méchain's responsibility, who arrived in Barcelona on July 10, 1792, where he faced many problems: in an accident he broke his collarbone and several ribs and was convalescing for 5 months, he couldn’t return to France because the Pyrenean War broke out, etc. There are two commemorative plaques, one in Barceloneta, at the Clock Tower, an old lighthouse, and the other in Montjuïc, because these were two of the points he used in his triangulations. In the mid-19th century, when Ildefons Cerdà was projecting the plan that would bear his name, he contemplated the creation of the Gran Vía Meridiana, whose initial layout coincides with the meridian used to establish the meter. The Cerdà Plan was approved in September 1860, and shortly thereafter the Northern Railway Company would use the layout of the future Gran Vía Meridiana for the passage of its railway line to Manresa and Zaragoza, which began operating in 1863. In the 1930s, work began on the undergrounding of the railway as it passed through the Meridiana. The tunnel was already finished at the start of the war, but the covering work was not completed until 1965.
To the west of the Sant Andreu Arenal station, there is currently the Can Dragó Park, on the land that until the undergrounding of the tracks housed the RENFE railway workshops that served the train line from Barcelona to Zaragoza.

More information:
- Ken Alder (2003). The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World. New York : Free Press. [There is a translation into Spanish: La Medida de todas las cosas: la odisea de siete años y el error oculto que transformaron el mundo]
- Denis Guedj (1997). La mesure du monde. Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont. [There is a translation into Spanish: La Medida del mundo: el meridiano]

Rutes científiques de Barcelona