Montjuïc Castle

Historic · Montjuïc summit (Sants-Montjuïc)Barcelona,Spain

A hilltop fortress built to control Barcelona rather than defend it, its guns commanding city and port, handed over by the army only in 2007.

Montjuïc Castle was built to control Barcelona rather than to defend it, and it did that job for three hundred years. The hill commands the city and the port together, and whoever held the fort could shell either. Today it is a quiet place of dry ditches, sloping ramparts and grass, with the container port working directly below on one side and the whole plain of Barcelona on the other. Almost nothing of it shows from the city, because it was built not to be hit. The fortress took its present shape after 1751, when the military engineer Juan Martín Cermeño pulled down the older fort, cut the dry moat and laid out the four bastions and the outworks. Its twentieth century is why most people come: courts martial sat here and prisoners were shot in the moat. The army held the hill long after it had any military use and gave it up to the city only in 2007, a handover the city celebrated in public with tens of thousands of people walking up.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come in the first or last hours of daylight — the whole site is open ground with no shade at all, and the ramparts in the middle of a summer afternoon are punishing rather than pleasant.
It is a park as much as a fort — families picnic on the grassed outworks and dogs run on the glacis, so the ground around the walls feels nothing like the history inside them.
The signage will not tell you the story — the twentieth-century history is barely interpreted on site, so read before you come or you will walk around a pleasant fort and learn nothing.
The outside is worth as much as the inside — the ditches, glacis and outworks wrap the whole fort and are open to walk, and most visitors do a courtyard circuit and miss all of it.

Things to do

1
Circle the ramparts once, all the way round
The top of the wall is a continuous walk. Do the full loop and you get four different cities in ten minutes: the container port and its cranes, the open sea, the whole plain of Barcelona inland, and behind it the Collserola ridge. Stop at each corner rather than photographing on the move.
2
Drop into the dry ditch
Steps lead down into the moat, which is grassed and quiet and much deeper than it looks from the bridge. From the bottom the walls close overhead and the sound of the city stops. This is where the executions took place, and the memorial stands at the Santa Eulalia stretch.
3
Follow the line of fire inland
Look at which way the emplacements point. A fort built to defend a harbour would face the sea; a good part of this one faces the other way, at the streets. Standing in one of those positions and following the line of fire is the fastest way to understand what the building was for.