Formula One raced through this park four times, and no institution in Barcelona records how it stopped

Walk up from Plaça d’Espanya to the museum and you are on a Grand Prix circuit. Nothing tells you so. There is no plaque, no marking on the road, and no line in the municipal street register.

But the encyclopaedia is quite specific about the beginning.

1933, and it started as a road

The road that encircles the central core of the Exposition was converted in 1933 into a motor-racing circuit when the Penya Rhin began car races there, on the Passeig dels Muntanyans up to the Palau Nacional, on a leafy route, over bridges, and as far as the old Municipal Stadium of Montjuïc.

Four years after the 1929 exposition closed, its access roads found a second use.

Read the route in that sentence, because you can walk it. Up the Muntanyans, past the Palau Nacional — the museum — and on to the stadium that is now the Olympic one. Over bridges, through trees, on public roads with the city’s monuments as scenery.

It is the same trick as everything else on this hill. The mountain was quarried, and the holes became gardens and a theatre. A fair was held, and the pavilions became museums and theatres. Roads were built to move visitors between exhibition palaces, and somebody looked at them and saw a racetrack.

Four Grand Prix, and not consecutive

The Spanish Grand Prix came to Catalonia at Pedralbes in 1951 and 1954. Then, in the encyclopaedia’s own list:

the Montjuïc one (1969, 1971, 1973, 1975)

and, from 1991, Montmeló, annually.

Four editions, in odd years. Not seven, not every year. The encyclopaedia gives no reason for the gaps and we are not going to supply one — but if you see this written as a continuous run from 1969 to 1975, the writer has copied rather than checked.

The club that brought it was the Reial Automòbil Club de Catalunya, whose own entry says it took an interest in Formula One, which it brought to the Montjuïc circuit (1969-75).

And it was not only Formula One. The same encyclopaedia records that Montjuïc also ran Formula 2 and Formula 3 through the sixties and seventies, and that the Fórmula 1.430 — created by the Spanish motorsport federation together with SEAT in 1970, for small single-seaters — raced at Montjuïc and at Calafat.

For roughly forty years, on and off, this park was a motor-racing venue.

The ending, which is missing

Here is where this page stops being a history and becomes an observation about records.

We looked in four encyclopaedia entries that describe the circuit — the mountain, Formula One, the RACC, and the circuit that replaced it. None of them gives a closing date. None of them gives a reason.

We looked in the municipal street register, which is where Barcelona explains its own place names and is usually voluble about anything that happened on a street. The Avinguda de l’Estadi, one of the main straights, is explained in five words: it leads to the Montjuïc stadium. The Avinguda dels Montanyans, where the 1933 races began, is explained by the fact that it is high up. Motor racing appears nowhere.

The only acknowledgement that the circuit ended at all is oblique, and it is in the entry for somewhere else. The Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya at Montmeló, it says, was

conceived as a substitute for the old Circuit de Montjuïc of Barcelona

— construction delayed until 1986, first stone 24 February 1989, opened 1991.

A replacement, for something the same encyclopaedia never says stopped.

Why we are not telling you the rest

You will find, in five seconds, an account of what happened at the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix on this hill. It is well documented by people who specialise in motorsport history, and we have no reason to doubt them.

We are not repeating it here, for two reasons that are the same reason.

The first is the rule this journal runs on: we cite institutions that would be accountable for what they publish, and where they are silent we say they are silent rather than borrowing a version we cannot stand behind. That rule is worth nothing if we suspend it for a good story.

The second is that people died. That is precisely the kind of subject on which a walking-tour company should either have a primary source in its hand or keep quiet.

So: the institutions of this city record that Formula One raced here four times and that a replacement circuit was built forty kilometres away. They do not record the ending. That silence is itself the interesting fact, and it is a fair thing to point at while standing on the road.

What is left, and where to look for it

The roads. The Passeig dels Muntanyans, the Avinguda de l’Estadi, the Passeig de Santa Madrona, the Avinguda del Marquès de Comillas — the 2014 planning modification that governs the whole mountain defines its own perimeter by naming these streets one after another, and the shape they draw is broadly the shape of the track.

And an admission in the planning law. Among the stated aims of that modification, alongside identifying Montjuïc as a parc equipat and protecting its open spaces:

to propose a future mobility model, reducing the excess of urbanised roadway that exists.

An excess of built road, on a mountain that is legally a park. The document does not say where the excess came from, and it does not have to. Two generations of visitors have been walking up a motor-racing circuit to look at Romanesque frescoes.

One number for scale, from the other end of that history. The city is replacing the 22 escalators that carry people up this hill — 7.8 million euros, finishing in the first quarter of 2026 — and it says that 30 million escalator uses are recorded here every year. The mountain that once moved people around it at two hundred kilometres an hour now moves them at half a metre a second, and only the second figure is published.

Standing on it

Do this once, on the way up: stop where the Avinguda de l’Estadi bends above the Olympic ring, look at how wide the carriageway is and how little traffic uses it, and notice the crash-barrier geometry of the curve. Parks are not built like that.

Then keep walking, because everything else on this hill is older and stranger — the quarries, the Jewish necropolis, the castle, the Fossar de la Pedrera.

Our Montjuïc walk is on those, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, two and a half hours. We are closed on 25 December and 1 January. And if you want the argument for coming up at all, it is here, along with why this is the one part of Barcelona locals have not walked away from.