MACBA and Plaça dels Àngels: Skateboards in El Raval
Why is it significant?
Let your eyes adjust to the white. After the dark, narrow streets of El Raval, the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, the MACBA, hits you like sunlight on snow: a long glass and white-panelled box with a great ramp behind its facade.
Key Facts
| Place | MACBA and Plaça dels Àngels: Skateboards in El Raval |
|---|---|
| Address | Plaça dels Àngels 1, 08001 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.38310, 2.16680 |
| Part of Walk | La Rambla and El Raval: Barcelona's River of Sand, Opera Bombs and Gaudí's Last Days |
| Generated | Generated |
Let your eyes adjust to the white. After the dark, narrow streets of El Raval, the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, the MACBA, hits you like sunlight on snow: a long glass and white-panelled box with a great ramp behind its facade. And in front of it, the clack and scrape of skateboards on stone.
The building was designed by the American architect Richard Meier and opened in 1995. It was meant as a statement, planted deliberately in the middle of one of the poorest, most crowded districts in Europe, a signal that El Raval was going to change. The skaters arrived almost at once. The smooth square, the ledges and the low steps turned out to be perfect, and Plaça dels Àngels became one of the most famous skate spots in the world, filmed in countless videos. Some neighbours complain; the city has never managed to send them away.
To understand why the museum was put here, you need the old nickname of this district: the Barrio Chino. A journalist in the 1920s used it to compare the area with the notorious quarters of American port cities, though hardly any Chinese people lived here. It meant cheap lodging houses, sailors, cabarets, tuberculosis and poverty, packed into some of the densest streets in Europe. From the 1980s the city began cutting open air and light: demolishing blocks, inserting squares, and moving in universities and museums.
Walk to the corner behind the museum and peek into the Centre de Cultura Contemporània, the CCCB. It occupies the Casa de la Caritat, a huge old poorhouse and orphanage. In its courtyard, a tall glass wall leans forward at the top, and in its reflection you suddenly see the rooftops of the city and, on a clear day, the sea.
On the other side of the square stands the plain stone chapel of the sixteenth-century Convent dels Àngels, now part of the museum. Nuns, poorhouse children, sailors, skaters: the same few metres. Now head back down towards Carrer del Carme and slip through the gateway into the garden of an old hospital, where the noise of the city suddenly drops away.