Avinguda d'Icària: Olympic Pergolas and a Lost Utopia
Why is it significant?
Walk along the central strip of Avinguda d'Icària and look up: over your head runs a line of strange pergolas, steel posts bent and tilted at different angles, holding up slats of timber like the ribs of a giant animal.
Key Facts
| Place | Avinguda d'Icària: Olympic Pergolas and a Lost Utopia |
|---|---|
| Address | Avinguda d'Icària, 08005 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.39050, 2.19610 |
| Part of Walk | From the 1888 Expo to the Catalan Manchester: Ciutadella Park & Poblenou, Barcelona |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk along the central strip of Avinguda d'Icària and look up: over your head runs a line of strange pergolas, steel posts bent and tilted at different angles, holding up slats of timber like the ribs of a giant animal. They give shade, but they also give the avenue a sort of rhythm, as if it were swaying.
These pergolas were designed by Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós for the Olympic Village of 1992. Yes, the same Miralles who later imagined the colourful roof of the Santa Caterina market. Everything around you, the flats, the gardens, the avenue itself, was built for the Olympic Games, to house the athletes and then become an ordinary neighbourhood of Barcelona.
Before that, this was a landscape of factories, warehouses and railway lines that cut the city off from its own beach. For more than a century Barcelona lived with its back to the sea. The Olympic project moved the railway, cleared the industrial plots and opened up kilometres of coastline. It was celebrated around the world, and it was also hard on the old industrial neighbourhood that disappeared under it.
But why Icària? The name comes from a book: Voyage en Icarie, published in 1840 by the French writer Étienne Cabet, who imagined a perfect communist society called Icaria. His ideas found eager readers among Barcelona's workers and radicals in the 1840s, and one of them was Narcís Monturiol, who would later build one of the world's first submarines. The old street through the factories of this area is said to have been named Icària after that dream.
So you are walking down an avenue named after a utopia of equal workers, through a neighbourhood built for athletes, on the ground of factories that really did employ thousands of workers. Follow the avenue to its end, where it meets the high walls of the oldest cemetery in the city.