Previous state
Designed in the nineteenth century by Ildefons Cerdà as the geometric and symbolic centre of Barcelona—where Avinguda Diagonal, La Meridiana, and La Gran Via were to intersect—Plaça de les Glòries was never able to play this role. For decades it functioned as a major road infrastructure hub dominated by flyovers, tunnels, and unused spaces. Its scale and the physical barriers fragmented the surrounding neighbourhoods and broke the continuity of pedestrian routes. With no identity or community life, Les Glòries was an urban void which, with a subsoil progressively filled with transport and service networks, consolidated as a purely technical hub. Nevertheless, the area still retained a latent value, namely the memory of historic routes like the Carretera de Ribes and the Rec Comtal, its metropolitan centrality, and its potential for connecting future green corridors. The challenge was how to reverse the vehicular dominance and recover Les Glòries as an accessible, lively public space of considerable ecological value.
Aim of the intervention
In 2007, following community demands, the residents of the four surrounding neighbourhoods and the Barcelona City Council signed the “Glòries Commitment”, which set out the basic principles for the zone’s transformation: moving vehicular traffic underground, demolishing the overpass to make space for a large central park, and providing new facilities and public housing. “Urban Canopy”, the winning proposal in an international competition, proposed consolidating the square as an urban hub that would balance metropolitan scale and neighbourhood life. The area was to keep its views towards La Sagrada Família and the Encants market while also reinforcing the ecological corridor running between La Ciutadella and La Sagrera parks. Inspired by Cerdà’s vision, the intervention has transformed a transport hub into square that doubles as a park, gives priority to pedestrian routes and sustainable mobility, reconnects neighbourhoods, and enhances the city’s biodiversity and climatic comfort.
Description
The project covers an area of 14 hectares in three overlapping layers, namely the subsoil, the ground level, and the green canopy. A fertile layer to achieve renaturalisation of the soil has been added over the underground level of transport networks. Above this, a continuous and accessible ground level now offers a flat space that reconnects the neighbourhoods at street level. The topmost layer, a lush green mass, extends the length of the city’s new green corridors providing shade, enhancing biodiversity, and functioning as a climate regulator. The three layers are connected by vertical biodiversity nodes that provide safe natural refuges populated by Mediterranean species which act as points of biological crossing and water recharge. Moreover, the activity nodes concentrate play areas, sports zones, spaces for events, water points, and access to tube station entrances. Water management is integrated into the project with rain gardens, wells, and tanks that keep the water cycle inside the park itself. Finally, the sections of Avinguda Diagonal, La Meridiana, and La Gran Via are reinterpreted as routes for pedestrians and cyclists, thus preserving the square’s structural role in the urban fabric.
Assessment
The renovation of Les Glòries has transformed one of Barcelona’s most complex urban voids into a public space of considerable environmental and social value. The design is outstanding in its adaptability, which has made it possible to adjust programmes and change positioning of the nodes throughout the various phases of its completion without losing its structural clarity. In a setting that, for decades, was dominated by asphalt and cement, and affected by fragmentation, the intervention has created a traffic-free zone where nature and people have recovered their leading roles. The local residents immediately embraced the space as their own, for a large and varied range of uses which foster harmonious coexistence. Moreover, environmental indicators show a notable improvement in biodiversity, as evidenced by the rise in bird species between the project’s first and second phases. Despite the technical difficulties of renaturalising a site that includes underground infrastructure, Les Glòries has now become established as a model for urban adaptation and coexistence of the city and its natural environment.
[Last update: 15/09/2026]
