Poblenou

Neighborhood · El Poblenou (Sant Martí)Barcelona,Spain

The old factory floor of Catalonia, hundreds of brick mills and free-standing chimneys left standing with a tech district built into the gaps.

Poblenou was the factory floor of Catalonia, and it still looks it. Brick mills, warehouses, workers' housing and free-standing chimneys stand all over the flat ground behind the beach, several hundred buildings left when the industry went in the 1960s and 1970s. When the city rezoned the area for technology and media firms around 2000, it did not clear them. Sheds were converted, facades kept, and glass offices went up in the gaps, so a single block can hold a nineteenth-century mill wall and a company headquarters. From the middle of the nineteenth century this ground filled with textile mills, chemical works and gasworks, and with streets of small houses for the people who worked in them. The quarter was called the Catalan Manchester while that meant something. Not all of the conversion worked: Can Ricart, the best-preserved complex of all, is protected, largely shut and partly derelict behind its gates. The quarter's own centre is not the tech district at all but the Rambla del Poblenou, a low shaded street of benches and old shopfronts running down to the sea.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Give it a slow hour on foot — the blocks are large and the interest is in details on ground floors, so this is a quarter that rewards wandering and punishes a direct route.
The horchata house on the rambla is a century old — More business than sight, but the only place still serving the same thing to the same families since the factory days.
Weekday mornings, not weekends — this is a working district rather than a leisure one, so the streets are alive when the offices and workshops are open and oddly empty on a Sunday.

Things to do

1
Follow the rambla down to the water
Start where the rambla crosses the Gran Via end of the district and walk seaward under the plane trees. The shops on either side are hardware stores, bakeries and bars with tiled fronts. Keep going and the street ends at the beach, which is how the quarter has always been laid out: work behind, water in front.
2
Catch a mill wall against a glass office, then count the storeys
Walk the blocks between the rambla and the Diagonal and look for the joins. In several places a brick factory front has been kept and a modern building put directly behind or above it, so you can stand at one point and have two centuries of construction in the same view. Then stop on any block and count upwards: workers' housing here ran to two or three floors, the new offices run to eight or nine, and the mill sheds have none at all. Reading the skyline of one short street tells you which decade each plot changed hands.
3
Read Can Ricart through its railings
The complex is closed, so go to the railings and look in: a clock tower, a chimney, ranges of low workshops around yards, some roofless. It is the most complete nineteenth-century factory left in the city, and seeing it half-abandoned tells you more about the quarter's argument with itself than any converted building does.