From the 1888 Expo to the Catalan Manchester: Ciutadella Park & Poblenou, Barcelona

A brick triumphal arch, a fortress turned parliament, a cascade the young Gaudí worked on, then the factory village of Poblenou, a cemetery with a skeleton's kiss and the glowing tower of Glòries

Barcelona · 11 stops · 25 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Arc de Triomf: A Triumphal Arch Without a War

Passeig de Lluís Companys, 08003 Barcelona, Spain

Stand under the great red-brick arch and look up at the stone frieze across its top: a woman seated on a throne, surrounded by figures who seem to be arriving from far away with gifts. Then look down the long promenade in front of you, with its palm trees and old lamp posts, running straight towards a park.

Most triumphal arches celebrate a victory. Rome built them for emperors who had crushed somebody. Barcelona's has no war behind it at all. It was built by the architect Josep Vilaseca as the main gateway to the Universal Exposition of 1888, the first world's fair ever held in Spain. The frieze on this side, by the sculptor Josep Reynés, shows Barcelona welcoming the nations. The triumph it celebrates is a city's ambition.

And notice the material. Not marble, not white stone, but brick, laid in patterns that echo the Moorish-inspired buildings of medieval Spain. In the 1880s this was a statement: a modern industrial city building its monuments out of the humble material of its own factories, and finding beauty in it. It is one of the first signs of what would become Catalan Modernisme.

The exposition was organised at astonishing speed, pushed by the mayor Francesc de Paula Rius i Taulet, and it opened in May 1888 on land that, only twenty years earlier, had been a hated military fortress. The promenade below you now bears the name of Lluís Companys, president of the Generalitat of Catalonia, who was executed in 1940 after the Civil War. On your left, the heavy palace with towers is the Palau de Justícia, the law courts, begun in the same years.

This whole walk follows one idea: Barcelona reinventing itself on the ruins of what came before, first a fortress turned into a fair, then factories turned into a district of ideas. Walk down Passeig de Lluís Companys towards the park gates, and look for a strange red castle on your right, just inside the railings.
2. Castell dels Tres Dragons: The Café That Became a Workshop

Passeig de Picasso 5, 08003 Barcelona, Spain

Here it is, the red castle: crenellated towers, bare brick, iron beams left visible, and along the top a row of white ceramic shields like the badges of an imaginary order of knights. It looks like a fortress from a children's book... built for an institution far less heroic. A restaurant.

The architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner designed it as the café-restaurant of the 1888 Exposition. He used brick and exposed iron, materials of factories and railway stations, and he showed the structure instead of hiding it behind plaster. Architects still look at this building as one of the starting points of Catalan Modernisme, years before the famous houses of Passeig de Gràcia.

The irony is that the building, as far as historians can tell, was not finished in time to serve the visitors of the fair. So Domènech found another use for it. After the exposition, he and his colleague Antoni Maria Gallissà turned it into a workshop where craftsmen experimented with ceramics, wrought iron, stained glass and stone carving. Many of the techniques that later decorated the great modernista buildings were tried out right here.

And the name? It is a joke. In 1865 the playwright Frederic Soler, known as Pitarra, staged a popular comic play called El castell dels tres dragons, the Castle of the Three Dragons, and Barcelona simply stuck the title onto this fake castle. Later, for most of the twentieth century, it housed the city's zoology museum, and generations of local children came here to stare at skeletons and stuffed animals.

Today it belongs to the natural sciences museum and is used for research. Look closely at the shields on the top: they were part of the decoration from the start, a medieval costume for a building made with the technology of the industrial age. Now walk deeper into the park, past the lawns and the palm trees, towards the sound of falling water.
3. The Cascada: Where the Young Gaudí Learned His Trade

Parc de la Ciutadella, Passeig de Picasso, 08003 Barcelona, Spain

Climb up the wide steps towards the monumental fountain and let it fill your view: rocks, grottoes, a triumphal arch of stone, water tumbling into a pool, griffins, and right at the top a golden chariot pulled by galloping horses. It is less a fountain than a stage set, an opera in stone.

When the military fortress was torn down, the city held a competition to design a park on its land, and the winner was the master builder Josep Fontserè. His project carried a motto that still sounds modern: gardens are to cities what lungs are to the human body. The Cascada was the centrepiece of his park, built in the 1870s and 1880s, and finished in time for the exposition of 1888.

Among the people working for Fontserè was an architecture student from Reus, Antoni Gaudí. He is credited with helping on the cascade's hydraulic design and on some of its decorative details. It is fun to stand here and look for the future in it: the artificial rocks and grottoes, the love of water and of nature imitated in stone... Thirty years later, in Park Güell, Gaudí would make rocks look like trees and trees look like rocks.

Now walk round to the left of the lake, beyond the boats, and you will meet the most unexpected resident of the park: a life-size stone mammoth, raising its trunk among the trees. It was sculpted in the early twentieth century, and the story goes that it was meant to be the first of a whole series of prehistoric animals that was never completed. Children climb on it; scientists point out that it was modelled on what people then believed a mammoth looked like.

Just behind these lawns lies the city zoo, where for almost forty years Barcelona's most famous resident lived: Snowflake, the only known albino gorilla, who died in 2003. Now cross the park towards the long, elegant building with a pond and a statue of a sleeping woman in front of it.
4. Parliament of Catalonia: The Fortress Arsenal

Parc de la Ciutadella s/n, 08003 Barcelona, Spain

In front of you stands a calm, symmetrical palace, and in the pond before it a marble woman lies curled up, her face hidden in her arm, as if she had cried herself to sleep. It is the quietest spot in the park, and it sits on the most painful memory in the city.

After Barcelona fell in September 1714, King Philip V ordered a citadel built right here: a huge star-shaped fortress with five bastions, designed by the military engineer Jorge Próspero de Verboom. To clear the ground, a large part of the La Ribera neighbourhood, something like a thousand homes, was demolished, and according to the chronicles the owners were made to tear down their own houses. For a century and a half the fortress's guns pointed not at foreign enemies, but at the city itself.

In 1869 the citadel was finally handed over to Barcelona and most of it was pulled down, to general rejoicing. Only a few buildings survived, and this was the biggest: the arsenal. It was refitted as a royal residence around the time of the 1888 Exposition, later served for decades as a museum of modern art, and in 1932 it became the seat of the Parliament of Catalonia.

The parliament was suppressed after the Civil War, and it returned to this building in 1980, after the restoration of democracy. So the arsenal of the fortress built to control Barcelona now houses the chamber where Catalonia's elected representatives meet. Whatever one's politics, it is one of the more remarkable reversals in European architecture.

The statue in the pond is called Desconsol, Grief, by the modernista sculptor Josep Llimona. The one you see is a copy; the original marble is kept indoors, in the national art museum on Montjuïc. Now leave the park by the eastern gate onto Carrer de Wellington, and look for a massive brick building that looks like a Roman ruin.
5. Dipòsit de les Aigües: A Roman Cistern Full of Books

Carrer de Ramon Trias Fargas 25-27, 08005 Barcelona, Spain

From the outside it looks like a fortress wall: a plain, massive block of brick, a little forbidding, on a street of university buildings. If the doors are open, step inside... and you are standing in a forest of tall brick pillars, joined by arches, rising to a vaulted ceiling, with students bent over laptops between them.

This is the Dipòsit de les Aigües, the water reservoir. Josep Fontserè, the designer of the park, built it in the 1870s to hold the water for the Cascada and for watering the gardens. The tank itself was on the roof, and everything you see inside was there to carry its enormous weight. That is why the pillars are so thick and the arches so many: this is a building designed to hold up a lake.

And here our young friend appears again. Antoni Gaudí, still a student, is believed to have helped Fontserè with the structural calculations for the reservoir. Whether that was a small job or a real share of the design, historians still debate. But it is pleasant to imagine the future builder of the Sagrada Família learning on this project how a vault carries a load down into the ground.

For most of the twentieth century the reservoir was no longer needed for water, and it passed through a series of humbler uses. Then, in the 1990s, it was restored and turned into a library for Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the public university named after the linguist who standardised modern Catalan. The architects kept the bare brick and the rhythm of the arches, and simply filled the space with shelves and light.

People often call it Barcelona's Roman cistern, and it really does feel like one, though it is barely a hundred and fifty years old. From here you leave the nineteenth century behind. Head east, past the university buildings and into the Olympic Village, to the broad Avinguda d'Icària, and look up at the strange structures twisting over its central walkway.
6. Avinguda d'Icària: Olympic Pergolas and a Lost Utopia

Avinguda d'Icària, 08005 Barcelona, Spain

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.
7. Cementiri del Poblenou: The Kiss of Death

Avinguda d'Icària s/n, 08005 Barcelona, Spain

Pass through the neoclassical gateway and you enter a silent city: long streets lined with walls of niches, five and six storeys high, each with its name, its date, its faded photograph or plastic flowers. The noise of the avenue disappears within a few steps.

This is the Cementiri del Poblenou, the oldest cemetery in Barcelona. It was opened in 1775 by Bishop Josep Climent, outside the city walls, at a time when the dead were still buried around parish churches in the crowded old town, and doctors worried about epidemics. Napoleon's troops destroyed it in 1813, and it was rebuilt a few years later by the Italian architect Antonio Ginesi in the sober, geometric style you see.

Now go looking, among the pantheons of the wealthy industrial families, for the most famous tomb here. A handsome young man kneels, eyes closed, his body going limp, while a winged skeleton bends over and kisses him on the forehead. It is called El Petó de la Mort, the Kiss of Death, made in 1930 for the grave of a young man from a local family, and usually attributed to the sculptor Jaume Barba. Death here is not a reaper with a scythe, but something tender, almost seductive... and that is precisely what makes it so unsettling.

Not far away is a much humbler grave, always covered in notes and flowers. It belongs to Francesc Canals Ambrós, a young shop assistant who died in 1899, in his early twenties, and was said to have the gift of healing and prophecy. People still call him the Santet, the little saint of Poblenou, and they still leave him their requests, although the Church has never recognised him.

The cemetery tells the story of the neighbourhood, from mill owners in marble chapels to workers in rented niches. Leave by the gate and walk inland, crossing the streets of the old village, until you reach the long tree-lined promenade at its heart, the Rambla del Poblenou.
8. Rambla del Poblenou: The Main Street of a Factory Village

Rambla del Poblenou, 08005 Barcelona, Spain

Stroll onto the central walkway of the Rambla del Poblenou, under the plane trees, between low houses, old shopfronts, terraces and the occasional modernista façade. It feels like the main street of a small town... and that is exactly what it was.

Poblenou means the new village. In the nineteenth century this area was not part of Barcelona at all but belonged to the municipality of Sant Martí de Provençals, a world of fields, irrigation channels and, increasingly, factories. Barcelona annexed Sant Martí in 1897. But the people who lived here kept their own identity, and for a long time, it is said, older residents would talk of going down to Barcelona when they headed for the centre.

The Rambla was laid out in the late nineteenth century as the village's promenade, the place to walk on Sunday, to meet, to argue, to court. Along it stands the Casino l'Aliança del Poblenou, a social and cultural society founded in the nineteenth century, one of the old institutions where working families went for theatre, dances and lectures. Associations like this were the universities of the workers: choirs, cooperatives, libraries, all organised by the people themselves.

That spirit is still in the air. Poblenou is one of the few places in Barcelona where a neighbourhood feels like a neighbourhood: grandparents on benches, kids on bikes, the old ironmonger next to a new coffee roaster. On summer evenings the terraces fill up, and during the neighbourhood's festa major the Rambla turns into one long open-air living room. And the Rambla runs, almost straight, from the beach up towards the heart of the old industrial zone, as if it were connecting two worlds.

For two centuries, the real horizon here was not the sea but the chimneys. Walk up the Rambla, away from the sea, to the crossing with Carrer de Pere IV, where you will start to see what made this neighbourhood famous across Spain.
9. Carrer de Pere IV: The Catalan Manchester

Rambla del Poblenou at Carrer de Pere IV, 08018 Barcelona, Spain

At the crossing of the Rambla and Carrer de Pere IV, turn slowly around and look above the rooftops. Sooner or later you will spot one: a tall, slender brick chimney, standing alone, sometimes in the middle of a square or a modern courtyard, with no factory left around it.

Those chimneys are the gravestones of the Catalan Manchester. In the eighteenth century the meadows here were used to bleach and dry printed cotton cloth, the famous indianes. Then, in the nineteenth century, came steam, and Poblenou filled with textile mills, dye works, foundries, distilleries and flour mills. At its height this was one of the densest concentrations of industry in Spain, and people compared it to the English cotton capital.

It was also a hard place to live. Families worked long shifts in noisy, dangerous mills, children too, and lived in crowded housing between the factory walls. Out of that life came the cooperatives and associations you heard about on the Rambla, and also bitter strikes and labour conflicts. Carrer de Pere IV, the long diagonal street in front of you, was one of the arteries of this industrial world, lined with factory gates.

And then, in the second half of the twentieth century, the factories closed or moved out to the suburbs. Poblenou emptied. The great sheds were left to warehouses, to rust, and in the 1990s to artists who found cheap lofts with skylights and enormous rooms. Some of the old complexes survive, like Can Ricart, a little further up this street, whose fate became a famous heritage battle in the 2000s.

Today many of the chimneys are protected, kept standing as monuments even where the factory around them has gone. A tower that once poured out smoke now just points at the sky, like an exclamation mark. Now head west through the grid of streets, towards the high-rise skyline, to Carrer de Roc Boronat.
10. Can Framis & the 22@ District

Carrer de Roc Boronat 116-126, 08018 Barcelona, Spain

In the middle of glass office blocks, you suddenly find a low, old factory of rough brick and stone, wrapped around a garden, with a modern extension slipped in between its walls. It looks as if the new city has politely stepped aside to let the old one stay.

This is Can Framis, an old textile mill of the Framis family, restored as a museum by the Fundació Vila Casas and opened at the end of the 2000s. Inside hangs contemporary Catalan painting, from the second half of the twentieth century to today. The foundation behind it was created by the pharmaceutical businessman and collector Antoni Vila Casas, who decided that living Catalan artists deserved museums of their own. But the point is not just the art, it is the building: a piece of the Catalan Manchester saved and given a second life, instead of being bulldozed.

Around it lies the district everyone here calls 22@, twenty-two arroba. The name comes from planning code: 22a was the label for industrial land on the city's zoning map. In 2000, Barcelona approved a plan to transform about two hundred hectares of Poblenou's old industrial land into a district for technology, design, research and media, adding the at sign to mark the new digital vocation.

The plan was ambitious and controversial. It brought universities, start-ups, international companies and new housing. It also brought rising rents, and debates about how much of the old neighbourhood and its working memory should survive. Can Framis is one answer to that question: a factory kept standing, with paintings on the walls where looms once ran.

Look around once more: chimneys beside data centres, cobbled courtyards beside glass façades. In this part of Barcelona, you can see two centuries of work side by side. Now walk up Roc Boronat to Avinguda Diagonal and turn left. You cannot miss the last stop: it is glowing on the horizon.
11. Torre Glòries: The Glowing Tower at Cerdà's Crossroads

Avinguda Diagonal 211, 08018 Barcelona, Spain

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.