MACBA and Plaça dels Àngels

Street · El Raval (Ciutat Vella)Barcelona,Spain

Barcelona's contemporary art museum, its white stone podium taken over by skateboarders who made it a destination of its own.

MACBA is Barcelona's contemporary art museum, and the reason to come is on both sides of its glass wall. Inside are some five thousand works made since the middle of the twentieth century, weighted towards Catalan and Spanish art. Conceptual art is the strength: about a thousand works of it arrived in 2020 as a single donation from the collector Rafael Tous, the largest gift the museum has had. Outside, on the white podium at the entrance, skateboarders have been running the same tricks since the late 1990s. Richard Meier finished the building in 1995 and gave it a white front, a long entrance ramp and a raised podium of smooth stone, meant as a clean approach to the art. Skaters read the same shapes as a course, video crews followed, and people now fly to Barcelona to skate this one square. On a warm evening a hundred people are on it — skaters, families on the benches, and a board hitting stone every few seconds. The square is now being rebuilt: the museum is extending into the old convent opposite, and the city has approved a plan to plant the podium with trees.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come after five in the afternoon — the square is a bare white yard in the morning and only fills as the light drops; the skating and the crowd around it arrive together.
Do not photograph faces up close — wide shots of the square are normal and nobody minds them, but pushing a lens into a skater's run is resented and will be told to you.
Stand at the top of the ramp — from there you see the whole podium at once and the runs come toward you; from ground level the square breaks into unconnected corners.
Expect hoardings — building work on the square and the neighbouring convent has closed sections at a time, so the surface you find may be smaller than the one in the videos.

Things to do

1
Watch one skater try one trick
Pick a single person rather than the crowd and stay with them. You will see the same attempt twenty or thirty times, each one a little different, and then the one that lands, at which point everyone nearby bangs their board on the ground instead of clapping. That noise is the applause here.
2
Step across the edge where two cities meet
Leave the white podium at its north corner and take the first narrow street out. Within twenty metres the light drops, the sky closes to a strip, and washing hangs above you. Standing with one foot in each is the fastest way to understand what was cleared to make this square.