Barcelona is the capital city of the autonomous community of Catalonia in Spain and the country's 2nd largest city, with a population of 1. Its urban area extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of around 4. About five million people live in the Barcelona metropolitan area. By the Middle Ages, Barcelona was home to the Counts who ruled the city and the surrounding area and was the de facto capital of the Crown of Aragon.
Barcelona is best known for the Modernista architecture Catalan Art Nouveau , which dates back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Throughout the year, the city stages a series of festivals and carnival-like street parties, many of which originated from traditional religious celebrations. These local fiestas typically include street parties, parades, human towers competitions, fire runs and fireworks displays. The tower building tradition began in a town called Valls, km south of Barcelona, sometime during the eighteenth century and quickly spread across Catalonia.
There are currently six official teams of Castellers in Barcelona who compete at local festivals throughout the summer. Located on the coast, one of the many things which make Barcelona stand out from other popular city break destinations is its long sandy beaches.
Thanks to its accessible location, the Barceloneta is a very popular beach and gets very busy at the weekends. The city boasts a total of just over four kilometres of coastline divided by piers and breakwaters into no less than nine beaches. In fact, the Somorrostro beach takes its name from the shantytown, which stood on the site from some time in the s until it was torn down in The beaches we know today were constructed in preparation for the Barcelona Olympics in In the run-up to the Olympics, millions of Euros were spent to redirect the train lines, tear down old buildings, clean up the waterfront and build an attractive new boardwalk complete with an Olympic Village, five-star hotels and a yachting marina.
Since then, more and more sand has been added, creating the wide attractive beaches which Barcelona is famous for today. This website uses cookies to ensure you have the best user experience. By continuing to use this site you are accepting our cookie policy - click on the link for more information. And it is a worthy reason, however there are many more old and modern architecture to see, a number of UNESCO sites, contemporary exhibitions, performances and hip places to hang out.
They are Spanish, but they also are not. The event prompted urban upgrades throughout the city, including a new sewage and water system, and ushered in the architectural era of modernism, with several grand new structures built throughout the city. In , the city, which had since grown to encompass six smaller settlements around it, hosted the International Exhibition, which brought more improvements, like public toilets and the complete replacement of gas lights with electric.
Then, after a series of political convulsions, the Spanish monarchy fell in That led to another fascinating episode in Barcelona urban planning history — a path not taken. The plan contained all the aspirations and flaws of modernism. In its way, it was humanitarian, with great attention paid to the hygiene and green space needed by workers.
In fact, it was in large part conceived to preempt a revolution of the working classes. But it also would have imposed a rigid artificial order on the city, with all uses separated into distinct areas: residential, industrial, civic, and leisure. Everything was to be huge — the new roads, the skyscrapers, the monuments.
Cities that separate their functions into distinct areas, the urban equivalent of monocrops, tend to render them all lifeless, as suburban American cities have discovered again and again. Instead, a civil war arrived, which ended in with the ascension of Gen. Francisco Franco, a fascist dictator who would rule over Spain, violently suppress Catalan culture, and largely neglect Barcelona until his death in The end of dictatorship and the arrival of democracy set off a series of small, locally focused, often self-funded urban improvements, which bolstered the city enough to win it the Summer Olympics.
Most notably, where the Poblenou district met the water, rundown industrial facilities were removed and replaced by an Olympic village, with new residences that became market housing afterward. The beach on Barceloneta was extended two miles north, across Poblenou, opening a huge stretch of renewed waterfront to city dwellers and tourists. A new port the Olympic Port was built to accommodate increased tourism. Ring roads rondas were constructed around the city to enable smooth transportation between venues and reduce congestion.
Along with a range of other projects and new green spaces, the Olympics transformed Barcelona into a fully modern global city and a hugely popular tourist destination. In recent years, Barcelona has been grappling with the consequences of its spiraling success, familiar to many growing cities: It is overrun by tourists, real estate prices are rising due to foreign speculation, gentrification is pushing out longtime residents, and there are too many cars, bringing with them noise, air pollution, and congestion.
In a city as compressed and crowded as Barcelona, these problems are no longer tolerable. Can a modern city really take back most of its streets from cars?
It seems far-fetched, but Barcelona has been through major changes before. If it is completed a very big if , every single resident of the city would have direct access to walkable, mixed-use public spaces.
Every resident would live in a superblock. Read all about it in our five-part series. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.
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