Barcelona's theatre district is an agricultural palace, a quarry and a workers' cooperative from Gràcia

Walk up from Plaça d’Espanya past the Laribal gardens and within about two hundred metres you pass four theatres. There is a name for the cluster — the Ciutat del Teatre — and it sounds like a plan.

It was not a plan. It is four separate accidents that happened to land next to each other, and the dates are the interesting part.

The amphitheatre came first, by half a century

The Teatre Grec is from 1929, built for the International Exposition, into the face of one of the quarries that hollowed out this mountain.

The architects’ archive gives two names: Ramon Reventós i Farrarons and Nicolau Maria Rubió i Tudurí.

That second name is the one to notice. Rubió i Tudurí is the man who, as Forestier’s assistant, laid out the gardens all around it — the terraces, the water staircase, the whole Mediterranean landscape that the 1929 exposition dressed this slope in. He did not design a theatre and then have gardens put round it. He designed the slope, and the theatre is part of the slope.

That is why the Grec works and why almost every other open-air venue in a European city does not. It is not a stage placed in a park. It is a hole in a hill that was landscaped and staged at the same time, by the same office, for the same fair.

The festival is from 1976, and it came out of an assembly

Here is the fact that reorders everything.

The theatre opened in 1929. The festival that fills it every summer counts its beginning from 1976 — the festival’s own fiftieth-anniversary material describes its origin as the founding memory of the Assembly of Actors and Directors of 1976.

Forty-seven years. For nearly half a century this amphitheatre existed without the thing it is now famous for.

And look at that date. 1976 is the year after Franco died. The festival’s own account of itself does not begin with a mayor or a ministry or a programme; it begins with an assembly of the people who work in theatre, deciding to do something in a municipal hole in the ground.

We are quoting that carefully because the counter-story is everywhere. You will be told the Grec has been running since 1929, since the exposition, since Margarida Xirgu. We looked for an institutional source for any earlier continuous festival and did not find one, and we are not going to be the page that invents the continuity. What the institution publishes is 1976, and 1976 is a much better story anyway.

The palace of agriculture

Downhill, the Mercat de les Flors.

It was the Palau de l’Agricultura, a noucentista pavilion built for the same 1929 exposition. It became a theatre by accident of a production: in 1983 it was provisionally adapted to stage Peter Brook’s «Carmen», and the provisional arrangement worked well enough that the city opened it as a permanent theatre in 1985.

An agricultural hall, borrowed for one show by an English director working in France, and never given back.

Its three halls are named for Maria Aurèlia Capmany, Ovidi Montllor and — for small formats — Sebastià Gasch, which is a fair summary of what twentieth-century Catalan culture thought worth remembering: a novelist, a singer, an art critic.

The company that is really from Gràcia

The Teatre Lliure is the one everybody assumes belongs to this hill, and it is the one that belongs here least.

It was founded in 1976 — the same year as the festival, and again a year after the dictatorship ended — by Fabià Puigserver with Pere Planella, Lluís Pasqual and Carlota Soldevila. It ran as a cooperative until 1988.

And for years its home was not in Montjuïc at all. It was in Gràcia, in the former cooperative building La Lleialtat.

That is not a footnote. Gràcia built its own public life out of workers’ cooperatives and ateneus because the town had almost no public buildings, and one of those cooperative halls became the most important theatre company in modern Catalonia. A theatre cooperative, in a consumer cooperative’s building, in a neighbourhood that had made cooperatives its civic architecture.

The move to Montjuïc was agreed in 1991, between the Generalitat, the Ajuntament and the Diputació, as an integral part of the Ciutat del Teatre project — and it did not actually happen until 2001. Ten years between the agreement and the keys.

The Gràcia hall kept performing until 2003, closed, was restored from 2007 to September 2010, and reopened. Both houses exist. The company did not leave Gràcia so much as stretch across the city.

⚠️ One inconsistency, in the encyclopaedia’s own entry. It says the company was founded in 1976, and then, four paragraphs later, lists Fabià Puigserver as its director (1975-91). Same page, same institution, one year apart. We are using 1976, which is the date the entry commits to in its opening sentence and the one the festival’s own material shares — and we are telling you the other number is right there.

And the school

The Institut del Teatre took that name in 1939, having been the Escola Catalana d’Art Dramàtic. It has depended on the Diputació de Barcelona since 1988, and it moved up here in 2000, into the precinct of the Mercat de les Flors.

Its building replaced something: the Mercat’s Espai B, incorporated in 1990, was demolished to build it. The architects’ archive dates the new building 1997–2000, which is the thing that reconciles the encyclopaedia’s two figures — 1997 for the building, 2000 for the move.

The library holds more than 120,000 volumes, which for a drama school is an extraordinary number, and it is the least visited important thing on this mountain.

So what is the Ciutat del Teatre, really

Read the dates as a sequence and the answer is clear.

1929 — a fair leaves behind an amphitheatre in a quarry and a palace for agriculture. 1976 — an assembly of actors and directors starts using the amphitheatre; in the same year four people found a company in a cooperative hall in Gràcia. 1983–85 — a Peter Brook production turns the agricultural palace into a theatre by accident. 1991 — three administrations sign an agreement to call all this a district. 1997–2001 — the school builds, the company arrives, and the name becomes true.

The «Ciutat del Teatre» is the label applied at step four to a situation that had already assembled itself at steps one to three. It is exactly the same mechanism as the Gothic Quarter, which was also named after the fact and is none the worse for it.

And the city is still doing it: the 2025 plan for the mountain includes turning the Paral·lel–mountain axis into a cultural corridor, connecting theatre and entertainment with Montjuïc’s facilities — which is a proposal to formalise a relationship between the Paral·lel’s theatres and these ones that has existed informally for a hundred years. The rest of that plan is here, and the Teatre Grec gardens are explicitly on its conservation list.

Seeing it

The cluster sits between the Laribal gardens and Passeig de Santa Madrona, and the walk that makes sense of it is the one that comes up through Laribal and arrives at the Grec from above — you look down into the quarry and the shape of the thing is obvious in a way it never is from the entrance.

What is open on a given day changes, so we do not print it. The gardens do not change, and neither does the slope.

Our Montjuïc walk is two and a half hours on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons — and yes, a walking tour led by an actor has an obvious opinion about a hill with four theatres on it. We are closed on 25 December and 1 January.

If you want the wider argument first: whether Montjuïc earns your day, and why it is the one place in Barcelona locals have not stopped going to.