Barcelona made its own sea. The coastline you see is partly medieval—but much of it was built in the 1990s, when the city bulldozed its industrial waterfront to host the Olympics and gave itself beaches that had never existed, trucking in sand from as far as Egypt. Before that, Barcelona turned its back on the Mediterranean; the shore was a wall of rail yards and factories. The port had always been Barcelona's engine, though—it made the city rich long before tourism did, and it still moves more cars than any other port in Spain. The old town behind it, the Barri Gòtic, isn't medieval at all—much of it was rebuilt in the 1920s to look older than it is. The city's real medieval masterpiece is the shipyard, the Drassanes, where galleys were built that fought all over the Mediterranean. And above it all is the one structure nobody expected to take this long: Gaudí's Sagrada Família, begun in 1882 and still unfinished. Its towers only reached their full height in 2016—and the building remains a work site, the city's longest-running construction project by a century. Barcelona doesn't just preserve its past—it keeps adding to it.
Audio guide Barcelona
Tella is a free audio guide for any place on Earth. Here are 30 places in Barcelona worth a story. Open one on the map and hear it read aloud in English, or take the Android app on a walk and let it narrate whatever you pass.
About Barcelona
Places worth a story
Camp Nou
football stadium in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
University of Barcelona
public research university located in Barcelona, Catalonia
Photo: Mister No · CC BY 3.0
Casa Milà
apartment building in Barcelona, designed by Antoni Gaudí
Photo: Thomas Ledl · CC BY-SA 4.0
Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia
Gothic cathedral and seat of the Archbishop of Barcelona, Spain
Thirteen geese live in the cloister of Barcelona Cathedral — one for each year of Saint Eulalia’s life when the Romans martyred her at thirteen. The story of her death gave the city one of its strangest street names: Baixada de Santa Eulàlia, where the Romans rolled her down a hill inside a barrel stuck with knives. Her relics lie in the crypt beneath the high altar, which is raised so visitors can see down into it.
Photo: Fernando · CC BY-SA 4.0
Lluís Companys Olympic Stadium
olympic stadium at Montjuïc, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Photo: Amadalvarez · CC BY 3.0
Plaça de Catalunya
historical public square in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Barcelona's busiest arteries all pour into this one vast square, and a compass rose set into its paving marks the spot as the city's official centre. In May 1937, Plaça de Catalunya became a battlefield when anarchists and communists turned on each other during the Spanish Civil War, fighting from the rooftops around the square. The fracas lasted days before the Republican government regained control.
Photo: Tango7174 · CC BY-SA 4.0
Casa Vicens
family residence in Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain), designed by Antoni Gaudí
Photo: Canaan · CC BY-SA 4.0
Basilica of Our Lady of the Sea
church
The stone for Santa Maria del Mar was carried on the backs of the bastaixos, the port workers of La Ribera, who hauled each block from the royal quarry in Montjuïc to this spot without pay. Their carved figures still wait in the bronze doors. The church went up in just fifty-four years, which for the fourteenth century was almost reckless speed, and that is why it reads as a single thought: one width of nave, one rhythm of columns, nothing added later. It is the purest Catalan Gothic in Barcelona, and the people who built it are in the stone itself.
Photo: Kent Wang · CC BY-SA 4.0
Museu Picasso
art museum in Barcelona, Spain
Picasso lived in Barcelona from age fourteen to twenty-three, and his friends here promised to build a museum for him one day. Jaume Sabartés, his secretary and close friend, donated his own collection of Picasso's work to make it happen in 1963 — the first museum ever dedicated to Picasso, and the only one opened while he was still alive. Picasso insisted it be housed on Montcada Street, where he had spent his teenage years. The collection holds over four thousand works, including The First Communion, painted when he was just fifteen.
Photo: uayebt · CC BY 2.0
Fundació Joan Miró
museum of modern art about Joan Miró located in Barcelona (Spain)
Photo: Kippelboy · CC0
German Pavilion, Barcelona
historical building in Barcelona, Spain
Pompeu Fabra University
university in Barcelona, Spain
MACBA Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art
contemporary art museum in Barcelona, Spain
Photo: Zarateman · CC0
Barcelona Sants railway station
railway station in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Photo: JT Curses · CC BY-SA 4.0
Gran Teatre del Liceu
opera house in Barcelona, Spain
On the opening night of the 1893 season, an anarchist threw two bombs from the upper balcony into the stalls of the Liceu — one landed on a row of seats, killing twenty people. The man, Santiago Salvador, was executed the following year. Yet by 1994 the greater threat was fire, as in 1861, and the rebuilt theatre reopened in 1999 with the same horseshoe layout but a modern glass-and-steel canopy over the old auditorium. For over a century before that, this was the largest opera house in Europe, with nearly 2,400 seats.
Photo: Chabe01 · CC BY-SA 4.0
La Boqueria
Public market in Barcelona, Spain
The iron-and-glass roof that covers La Boqueria was built in 1914, but the space has been a market since 1217, when meat stalls gathered at the old city gate. Today the counters are piled high with everything from Iberian ham to sea urchins, and the bars tucked between the stalls serve as much coffee as cava. A mosaic by Joan Miró marks the main entrance from La Rambla, where a full slab of pavement was laid as a kind of welcome mat. The market’s official name is Mercat de Sant Josep, after the monastery that once stood beside it.
Stories are written by an AI from public map and encyclopaedia data and may contain mistakes.