When we think of a walled city, very specific images come to mind: large stones, high towers, solemn gates, and a clear perimeter separating the "inside" from the "outside." Europe has many such examples: Montblanc, Carcassonne, Ávila, Lucca. These are places where the past is visible, spectacular, and recognizable. That is why, when I read in the local press this summer that a European project dedicated to the medieval walls of Granollers was beginning, I was surprised. The question was automatic: Which walls? I had never seen any in my city.

For me, Granollers was a modern, commercial, and dynamic city, organized around the Porxada, the market, the schools, and daily life. My only reference to a possible medieval tower was a stone base near the library, where we used to run with friends after finishing our homework. A stone without stories, without epic, without context. The medieval past was not part of my imagination. It was not a constitutive element of the identity of the city I knew.

The news, however, sparked curiosity. We began to investigate and discovered that Granollers had indeed been a walled city. But its walls had not resisted the passage of centuries in the same way as in other European cities. They had not remained visible. They had not become a monument. The city grew over and against the wall, and it became absorbed by the houses and streets that were built around it. What was once a border later became a foundation.

At the Granollers Museum, they explained it to us in a way that changed our perception: the straight, narrow streets in the center are not just streets; they are a unique feature of the city. They are what had previously been the inner corridors of the wall, where the guards who protected the city circulated. The wall has not disappeared: it is integrated into current urban life. It is not visible, but it is there. We just need to learn how to see it.

We went to check. And yes, on a central street, inside some buildings, you can clearly recognize the texture and thickness of the original wall. It is an irregular, robust stone wall, different from the modern facades. And the most surprising thing was rediscovering the wall in the Medieval Tannery (Adoberia medieval), a space many of us knew from school visits but had never looked at with the awareness of what it represented. Among vats, channels, and worked stones, there was an intact section of the wall. It had always been there. We just needed to know how to look.

From this point on, the way we understood our city changed. Granollers has not lost its wall; it simply carries it incorporated into its evolution. This led us to reflect on heritage and on Europe.

European heritage is not only what is monumental and spectacular. It is not only what is exhibited. It is also what persists within daily life, often in silence. The walls of many European cities tell the same story: the need to protect oneself, to organize, to distinguish who belongs to the community and who remains outside. Walls are a material expression of fear and fragility, but also of social cohesion.

Over time, however, walls ceased to be useful. Commerce, exchanges, urban growth, and openness to the world led cities to begin tearing them down, reusing the stones, or architecturally absorbing them, as happened in Granollers. Europe transitioned from protection to connection. And this transformation is, in itself, cultural heritage.

Thus, the walls of Granollers are not just a medieval vestige: they are a physical testimony to European transformation. They are proof that identities evolve, that cities are not petrified objects, but living organisms that adapt, modify, and reinvent themselves.

That is why this project is about learning to look about understanding that heritage is not always presented obviously. Sometimes, heritage is what we didn't know we knew. What we had already walked past a hundred times without asking ourselves what it was. Heritage is discovery, context, and a relationship with the place we inhabit.

Going through this process has allowed us to experience the city in a new way. Not as a simple space where we live, but as a space with layers, memory, and depth. Now, when we walk through the central streets, we don't just see facades: we see lines, structures, and histories navigating beneath the city's skin.

For us, heritage is this: learning to see and understanding that the past is not as far away as we think.

We just need to look a little more carefully.