Montjuïc, the Hill of Big Dreams: Barcelona's 1929 Expo, Olympic Ring & Castle

From a bullring turned shopping mall to the fortress at the top: a climb up Barcelona's own mountain through the 1929 International Exposition, the Magic Fountain, Mies van der Rohe, Romanesque treasures, two Olympics that happened and one that never did

Barcelona · 11 stops · 26 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Las Arenas: The Bullring That Became a Mall

Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes 373-385, 08015 Barcelona, Spain

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.
2. Plaça d'Espanya & the Venetian Towers

Avinguda de la Reina Maria Cristina, 08004 Barcelona, Spain

Stop between the two brick towers and turn round to face the roundabout you just crossed, with its huge fountain of stone figures in the middle. Then turn back again and look up the avenue: a straight line of light poles, exhibition halls and fountains running all the way to a domed palace on the hill.

These twin towers are the Torres Venecianes, about 47 metres tall, and if they look Italian, that is because they are copies. The architect Ramon Reventós modelled them on the bell tower of Saint Mark's in Venice. They were never meant to hold bells. They were a gate, the ceremonial entrance to the International Exposition of 1929, the event that turned this whole hillside from quarries, shacks and vegetable plots into the park you are about to climb.

The Exposition took a very long time to arrive. It was first planned for 1917 as a show of the electrical industries, with Josep Puig i Cadafalch, one of the great modernista architects, drawing up the plan for the site. Then came the First World War, delays, and in 1923 the coup of General Miguel Primo de Rivera. The dictator distrusted Catalan nationalists, Puig among them, and the project was taken out of his hands and given a grander, more Spanish flavour.

When King Alfonso XIII finally opened it in May 1929, Barcelona put on a show the world had rarely seen. Millions of visitors came to walk this avenue, the Avinguda de la Reina Maria Cristina, at night, when water and coloured light did things nobody had engineered before. The halls along both sides are still the city's trade fair grounds, and big congresses still fill them every year.

The fountain behind you in the middle of Plaça d'Espanya has a famous name attached: its design is by Josep Maria Jujol, Gaudí's most gifted collaborator, though the sculptures are by other hands. Few drivers circling it ever notice. Now walk up the avenue and bear right at the end, towards a red-brick factory with two slim towers.
3. CaixaForum: The Casaramona Textile Mill

Avinguda de Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia 6-8, 08038 Barcelona, Spain

Walk up to the long brick building with the crenellated walls and the two slender towers, and before you go anywhere near the entrance, notice that it does not look like a factory at all. It looks like a castle from a fairy tale, built by someone who loved brick a little too much.

It was a factory, though. Casimir Casaramona, a cotton manufacturer, commissioned it from Josep Puig i Cadafalch, and it was finished in 1911. The city even gave it its annual prize for the best new building. Here is the detail most visitors miss: those elegant towers were not decoration. They held water tanks. Textile mills burned easily, and the story goes that Casaramona had already lost an earlier works to fire, so Puig split the plant into separate single-storey halls divided by streets, with water ready to fall from above.

And yet the mill worked for only a handful of years. Around 1920 production stopped, and this beautiful machine for weaving cotton became a warehouse. After the 1929 Exposition it took an even stranger turn: for decades it housed the horses and stables of the national police. Imagine mounted officers trotting out under these modernista arches.

The savings bank la Caixa bought the building and, after a long restoration, opened it in 2002 as CaixaForum, an arts centre. The Japanese architect Arata Isozaki designed the new entrance, which is why you go in beneath two great trees made of steel and glass, rising out of a sunken courtyard. Old brick above, new metal below, and somehow they get on.

Puig i Cadafalch is a name you will keep meeting on this hill. He drew the first plan for the whole Exposition, before politics pushed him aside. Now cross the avenue towards the wide stone basin at the foot of the great staircase. If it is evening, you may already hear music.
4. The Magic Fountain of Montjuïc

Plaça de Carles Buïgas 1, 08038 Barcelona, Spain

Stand at the rim of this wide oval basin and look at the clusters of nozzles and glass in the water. In daylight it can look like a quiet municipal pond. After dark, on the right evenings, it turns into one of the great free shows of Europe.

The Font Màgica was designed by Carles Buïgas for the Exposition of 1929, and it was built at speed, in less than a year, by a huge workforce. Buïgas was obsessed with what he called the architecture of light and water. He did not stop at the fountain: he also arranged the beams of searchlights that fanned out behind the palace on the hill, so that at night Montjuïc seemed to wear a crown of light.

Music came later. In the 1980s the fountain was restored and synchronised with sound, and in 1988, at a great outdoor concert on this hill, Freddie Mercury and the soprano Montserrat Caballé sang their duet Barcelona, the song that became the unofficial anthem of the city's Olympic dream. Mercury died in 1991 and never saw the Games. When they came, it was his recorded voice that carried the song around the world.

Now look just above the fountain, towards the staircase. Four tall Ionic columns stand there in a row. Puig i Cadafalch first raised them in 1919, and everybody understood the message: four columns, for the four red stripes of the Catalan flag. In 1928, on the eve of the Exposition, Primo de Rivera's regime had them torn down. They were rebuilt only in 2010. Some buildings make speeches... these four were silenced for eighty years.

So the fountain you are looking at is not just a spectacle. It is the place where Barcelona has always come to celebrate, and occasionally to argue about who it is. Now walk to the right of the basin, to a low, flat building of glass and stone that hides behind it. It may be the most influential small building of the twentieth century.
5. The Barcelona Pavilion of Mies van der Rohe

Avinguda de Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia 7, 08038 Barcelona, Spain

Look at the long flat roof that seems to float above the ground, the walls of polished stone that stop short of meeting each other, and the shallow pool reflecting the sky. After the brick castles and baroque fountains around it, this feels like a building from another century... because, in spirit, it is.

This is the German Pavilion for the 1929 Exposition, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe together with the designer Lilly Reich. The strange thing is that it exhibited nothing. Other countries filled their halls with machines and wine. Germany, still recovering from defeat and inflation, sent an empty building and said, in effect: this is who we are now. Calm, modern, open.

Walk inside and follow the materials: Roman travertine underfoot, green marble from the Alps, and one wall of golden onyx, chosen, it is said, from a single block so that its veins run like a mirror. The roof rests on slim cross-shaped columns clad in chrome, so the walls carry nothing and can stand wherever they like. In a small pool at the back stands a bronze woman by Georg Kolbe, called Alba, the Dawn, raising her arms as if waking up.

The famous Barcelona Chair, the leather and steel seat now copied in a thousand corporate lobbies, was designed for this pavilion, intended for the King and Queen of Spain at the opening. Legend says they never actually sat down in them. The building was dismantled in 1930, after the Exposition, and for decades it survived only in black-and-white photographs, growing more famous with every architecture student who studied them.

In the 1980s three Catalan architects rebuilt it on the same plot, from those photographs and fragments of the plans, and it reopened in 1986. So what you are seeing is a copy that has become the original. Next, keep to the right along the avenue, towards a fortified gate that looks like it was borrowed from a medieval Castilian town.
6. Poble Espanyol: All of Spain in One Village

Avinguda de Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia 13, 08038 Barcelona, Spain

In front of you rises a stone gateway with two massive round towers, battlements and a narrow arch. If you have ever been to Ávila, the walled city west of Madrid, you may feel a jolt of recognition. This is a copy of its San Vicente gate, and behind it lies a whole invented town.

The Poble Espanyol, the Spanish Village, was built for the 1929 Exposition. The architects Francesc Folguera and Ramon Reventós, the same Reventós who designed the Venetian towers, travelled across Spain with two artists, the painter Xavier Nogués and the critic Miquel Utrillo. They photographed, sketched and measured hundreds of villages, and then stitched their favourite pieces together: a square from Castile, a street from Andalusia, a Basque house, an Aragonese tower, a bit of Galicia around the corner.

The result is a Spain that never existed and yet feels completely familiar, more than a hundred buildings arranged like a real town, with a main square, a church, steep lanes and staircases. Inside many of the houses, craftspeople still work today: glass, ceramics, leather, jewellery, in workshops that make it more than a film set.

It was only supposed to last for a season. Like most of the Exposition's pavilions, it was due to be demolished once the visitors went home. But Barcelona had grown fond of it, and it was kept. There is something quietly political in that, too: a dictatorship that wanted to show a single, united Spain built its showcase in the capital of Catalonia, and Catalans ended up adopting it as their own amusement.

At night the village becomes a venue for concerts and parties, and its cobbled streets fill with people who have no idea which region they are standing in. Now leave the gate behind and head east, up the escalators and terraces towards the great domed palace. Take your time... the view grows with every flight of steps.
7. MNAC: The Palau Nacional and the Rescued Murals

Palau Nacional, Parc de Montjuïc s/n, 08038 Barcelona, Spain

Turn your back to the palace for a moment, right here at the top of the steps, and look down. The fountain, the avenue, the Venetian towers, the round bullring, and beyond them the whole of Barcelona stretching towards Tibidabo... this terrace was designed to make you feel exactly like this.

The Palau Nacional was built as the central hall of the 1929 Exposition, a showpiece with a big dome and corner towers. It was never supposed to be a museum, but after the fair it became the home of the art of Catalonia, and today it is the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, the MNAC.

The treasure inside has a dramatic story. In the early twentieth century, dealers and foreign collectors discovered the medieval churches of the Pyrenees, with their walls covered in Romanesque paintings. In 1919 the apse paintings of one small church, Santa Maria de Mur, were sold, removed and shipped abroad. They ended up in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where they still are.

Catalonia panicked, and then acted. Between 1919 and the early 1920s, Italian specialists were hired to peel the frescoes off the walls of remote mountain churches using a technique called strappo: glue cloth to the painting, let it dry, and pull away a skin of pigment. Carried down the valleys on mules and carts, the paintings were remounted here on apses rebuilt to the original shapes. The star is the Christ in Majesty from Sant Climent de Taüll, a church consecrated in 1123, with huge eyes staring straight through you.

It is a strange feeling, standing in a city museum inside the reconstructed curve of a village church, nine hundred years after someone painted it by candlelight. Were the paintings saved or taken? Both, people still say. Now walk up the hill along the Avinguda de l'Estadi, towards a stadium with a classical façade... and a story about an Olympics that never happened.
8. Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys & the Olympic Ring

Passeig Olímpic 15-17, 08038 Barcelona, Spain

Walk along the old façade of the stadium, with its arches, stone horses and sculptures, and notice how modest it looks for an Olympic arena. That is because the outside belongs to 1929, and the inside to 1992. Between those two dates lies one of the saddest stories in sport.

The stadium was built for the Exposition and opened in 1929, with an eye on the Olympic Games. Barcelona bid for 1936 and lost the vote to Berlin. When Hitler's regime took over the Berlin Games, many on the left refused to go, and Barcelona organised an alternative: the People's Olympiad, set to open in this stadium on the 19th of July 1936.

Thousands of athletes had arrived, from teams, workers' clubs and exiles. But on the 17th and 18th of July, part of the army rose against the Republic, and on the morning of the 19th the fighting reached the streets of Barcelona. The Games were cancelled before a single race. Most athletes went home; a few stayed and joined the militias. The Spanish Civil War had begun.

Fifty-six years later, the stadium got its revenge. For the 1992 Games the old façade was kept and the ground inside was dug down to fit a modern arena. At the opening ceremony, the Paralympic archer Antonio Rebollo shot a flaming arrow towards the cauldron at the top. Whether it really landed inside or sailed just past the rim while the gas caught is still argued over in bars... but the flame lit, and the world gasped. In 2001 the stadium was named after Lluís Companys, the president of Catalonia during the war. You will meet his name again at the end of this walk.

Look west: the white needle bending over the Olympic Ring is Santiago Calatrava's communications tower, built to carry television pictures of those Games around the world, and beside it the low steel roof of the Palau Sant Jordi, by Arata Isozaki. Now head east along the Avinguda de l'Estadi, towards a white building that looks like it was drawn by a child with a ruler.
9. Fundació Joan Miró

Parc de Montjuïc s/n, 08038 Barcelona, Spain

Look at the white walls, the rounded skylights curling up from the roof like ears listening for the sun, and the terraces stepping down into the pines. After the pomp of 1929, this building feels like taking a deep breath of clean air.

The Fundació Joan Miró opened in 1975, and it was designed by Josep Lluís Sert, a Barcelona architect and an old friend of the painter. Sert had left Spain after the Civil War, made his career in the United States and became dean of the design school at Harvard. He came home to build this, and he also designed Miró's studio in Mallorca. Miró himself was born in Barcelona in 1893, in the old town below this hill, and he wanted a place where young artists could experiment, not just a shrine.

Inside, the light falls from above, and the red, yellow, blue and black of Miró's world, stars, birds, women, moons, sit on white walls like notes on a page. The building and the paintings were made for each other, and you can feel it.

But the surprise is in a glass case. It is a fountain by the American sculptor Alexander Calder, and the liquid flowing in it is not water. It is mercury. Calder made it for the pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the Paris World's Fair of 1937, the same pavilion, designed by Sert, where Picasso first showed Guernica, and where Miró painted a huge mural of a Catalan peasant, The Reaper, that was later lost. The mercury came from the mines of Almadén, the Republic's way of showing the world its besieged wealth. Today it sits behind glass, because mercury, as we now know, is beautiful and poisonous at once.

So one room on Montjuïc quietly holds the memory of the most famous exhibition of the Civil War. From here, follow the road east along the slope, past the pines, towards gardens of water and bulbs, with the castle walls appearing above you.
10. Jardins de Mossèn Cinto Verdaguer: Mount of the Jews

Avinguda de Miramar, 08038 Barcelona, Spain

Step onto the terraces and look down at the ponds and beds below you, with the cable car gliding silently overhead towards the castle. Depending on the season you will find tulips, irises, dahlias or water lilies, because these gardens are dedicated to plants that grow from bulbs and to plants that live in water.

They are named after Mossèn Cinto, Father Jacint Verdaguer, the priest-poet whose epic poems helped bring the Catalan language back to literary life in the nineteenth century. When he died in 1902, an enormous crowd followed his funeral through Barcelona. A poet-priest, on a hill full of flowers, felt right to the city.

Now think about the name of the whole mountain: Montjuïc. The most widely accepted explanation is that it means the Mount of the Jews. In the Middle Ages, the Jewish community of Barcelona buried its dead on this slope, and gravestones with Hebrew inscriptions have been found here. Some historians prefer another root, the Mount of Jupiter, from Roman times... but the Jewish cemetery is a fact, and the community lived in the city until the violence of 1391.

Montjuïc has always worked for the city below. For two thousand years its sandstone was quarried and carried down to build Barcelona: Roman walls, the cathedral, the churches of the old town. Much of the Gothic Quarter is, quite literally, made of this hill. And for centuries it was a place the city kept at arm's length: cemeteries, quarries, shacks, the gallows, and a fortress pointing its guns at the streets.

Only in the twentieth century did Barcelona start to see the mountain as a park, with gardens like these on old, worked-out ground. From the upper terraces you can see the port and the sea opening up beyond the trees. Now climb the last stretch of road towards the walls above you. The fortress at the top is the final stop, and the most serious one.
11. Castell de Montjuïc

Carretera de Montjuïc 66, 08038 Barcelona, Spain

Cross the bridge over the dry moat and stop at the thick, angled walls of the fortress, with the sea on one side and the whole city on the other. From up here every street of Barcelona is in range... and that, for most of its history, was precisely the point.

The first fort was thrown up in 1640, in a matter of weeks, during the Reapers' War, when Catalonia rebelled against the King of Spain. In January 1641 Catalan defenders beat back a royal army on these slopes. The star-shaped fortress you see today was rebuilt in the eighteenth century, after Barcelona fell in 1714, and its guns were pointed as much at the city as at any enemy fleet.

There is one gentle story up here. In the 1790s the French astronomer Pierre Méchain set his instruments on these walls to measure the arc of the meridian between Dunkirk and Barcelona. That measurement became the basis of a new unit, the metre. Méchain found a tiny inconsistency in his own readings and, the story goes, it tormented him for the rest of his life.

The rest is darker. In 1842 the city was bombarded from this fortress to crush a revolt. In the 1890s anarchist suspects were held and tortured in its cells. In 1909 the educator Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, the man the avenue of the Exposition is named after, was shot in its moat. And on the 15th of October 1940, Lluís Companys, the president of Catalonia, handed over to Franco's regime by the Gestapo in occupied France, was executed here by firing squad after a summary court martial. Accounts say he took off his shoes, to feel the earth of Catalonia, and refused a blindfold.

Since 2007 the castle has belonged to the city, and it is now a place of memory, gardens and wide views rather than guns. You began this walk in a bullring, passed a fairground, a museum and an Olympic stadium, all built to show Barcelona to the world. Up here, you see what the city survived to build them. Take a last look at the sea... and when you are ready, the cable car will carry you gently back down.