Torre Glòries: The Glowing Tower at Cerdà's Crossroads
Why is it significant?
There it is, rising in front of you: a smooth, rounded tower, like a giant bullet or a cucumber, as locals often joke, its skin a shimmer of glass louvres in reds and blues. At night it lights up in changing colours, thanks to thousands of LED lights on its façade.
Key Facts
| Place | Torre Glòries: The Glowing Tower at Cerdà's Crossroads |
|---|---|
| Address | Avinguda Diagonal 211, 08018 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.40350, 2.18950 |
| Part of Walk | From the 1888 Expo to the Catalan Manchester: Ciutadella Park & Poblenou, Barcelona |
| Generated | Generated |
There it is, rising in front of you: a smooth, rounded tower, like a giant bullet or a cucumber, as locals often joke, its skin a shimmer of glass louvres in reds and blues. At night it lights up in changing colours, thanks to thousands of LED lights on its façade.
This is the Torre Glòries, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel and completed in 2005, about a hundred and forty-five metres high. It was built as the headquarters of the Barcelona water company and was long known as Torre Agbar. Nouvel said he was thinking of a geyser, a column of water bursting out of the ground, and also of the rounded rock towers of Montserrat, the holy mountain of Catalonia.
It stands at Plaça de les Glòries, and this crossroads has a story of its own. When the engineer Ildefons Cerdà drew his plan for the Eixample in 1859, he imagined this point, where the great avenues Diagonal, Meridiana and Gran Via meet, as the new centre of Barcelona. For more than a century and a half it was instead a messy traffic junction, with a raised ring road roaring over it.
In recent years the ring road was torn down, the traffic sent into tunnels, and the square is being turned into a large park. Around it, the Museu del Disseny, the design museum, and the mirrored roof of the Encants flea market have made Glòries a destination at last. Cerdà's centre is finally becoming a centre.
And that brings the walk to its end. You began at a brick arch built for a world's fair on the ruins of a fortress, you passed the cascade where the young Gaudí learned his trade, the parliament in an arsenal, the factory village and its chimneys. Here, at the crossroads Cerdà dreamed of, Barcelona is still doing what it has always done best: building the next city on top of the last one.