Las Arenas: The Bullring That Became a Mall

Why is it significant?

Stand on the corner of Gran Via and Carrer de Tarragona and take in that great round drum of red brick, wrapped in horseshoe arches and stripes of glazed tile. It looks like a Moorish palace that wandered into a traffic junction and decided to stay... and in a way, that is exactly what happened.

Key Facts

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Stand on the corner of Gran Via and Carrer de Tarragona and take in that great round drum of red brick, wrapped in horseshoe arches and stripes of glazed tile. It looks like a Moorish palace that wandered into a traffic junction and decided to stay... and in a way, that is exactly what happened. This is Las Arenas, opened as a bullring in 1900 and designed by the architect August Font i Carreras. The style is called neo-Mudéjar, a romantic revival of the brick and tile craft of medieval Muslim and Christian Spain, and at the time it was the uniform of the Spanish bullring. On afternoons of corrida, thousands of spectators poured off the trams on Gran Via, and the roar from inside carried across the whole square. Then the crowds thinned. Barcelona never loved bullfighting the way Madrid or Seville did, and the last fight was held here in 1977. For more than thirty years the ring stood empty, its sand turning to weeds. In 2010 the Catalan Parliament voted to ban bullfighting altogether. Spain's Constitutional Court later struck the ban down, but by then the city had moved on, and no corrida has returned to Barcelona. What happened next is a beautiful piece of architectural surgery. The practice of the British architect Richard Rogers kept the old brick shell, propped it up on steel while everything inside was carved away, and slid an entirely new building into the hole. It reopened in 2011 as a shopping and leisure centre. The floor where the bulls once ran is now lifted high, and on top there is a round terrace that circles the dome like the rim of a hat. If you take the lift up to that terrace, the whole of this walk is laid out in front of you: the square, the two brick towers, the long avenue, the domed palace and, behind it, the green bulk of Montjuïc with a fortress on its summit. That is where you are going. Come back down and cross the roundabout towards the two tall towers on the far side.