The Magic Fountain was switched off for two and a half years, and the city's own spec sheet still describes a machine that no longer exists

The fountain at the bottom of the hill is the most photographed object on Montjuïc and one of the least understood.

Not because the story is complicated. Because the interesting parts of it are recent, and the page that explains the machine is describing a machine that was dismantled last year.

The man was not an architect

Carles Buïgas i Sans, born in Barcelona on 18 January 1898.

The Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana gives him two words that matter: enginyer luminotècnic and autodidacte. A lighting engineer, self-taught. He is the son of an architect — Gaietà Buïgas — but he is not one himself, and every version of this story that promotes him misses the point of it.

He had been inside the Exposition project since 1916, on the commission doing preparatory work, and in 1926 he was made head of its water and lighting section. So when the Ajuntament tells the story of the fountain being a last-minute inspiration — the organisers felt something was missing, alguna cosa especial que la fes diferent, and Buïgas turned up with a plan for una obra colossal, atrevida i costosa — the man turning up with the plan was already running that department.

He was thirty-one in 1929. We are working that out from the birth date, because no institution publishes his age; the Ajuntament settles for el jove Buïgas.

Three thousand men, in under a year, and no footnote

Here is the number everyone repeats, and where it actually comes from.

The Ajuntament’s own history page: en menys d’un any, més de 3.000 obrers van convertir en realitat aquell somni del jove Buïgas.

That is the only institutional appearance of the figure we could find. The COAC does not repeat it. The city’s water utility does not repeat it. The Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana does not repeat it. And the Ajuntament does not say where it got it.

We are printing it because the city publishes it, attributed to the city, with the “more than” intact — and we are telling you it stands on a single page with no source behind it. That is different from a verified figure and it is worth knowing which one you are holding.

What nobody publishes at all is a date. The Ajuntament’s timeline gives the fountain one line for its own creation: 1929: creació de la Font Màgica. No day, no month, no first show. If somebody hands you a precise opening date, it is not coming from the city, the architects’ college or the encyclopaedia.

What is underneath

The numbers on the city’s technical page are the good part of it, and they are worth reading before you stand in front of the thing.

Three concentric ponds, holding 3,100,000 litres. Nineteen water effects in the two central ponds, plus twenty peripheral fountains set into the ground in the lower one, each with five different effects of its own. 3,620 pipes. 132 electric motors.

And the light: colour banks with pentagonal prisms carrying five colours — white, yellow, red, blue and green — throwing light out through 120 rectangular concrete skylights, prefabricated, closed with toughened white glass.

The city’s own summary of what that adds up to: 7.000 milions de combinacions possibles d’aigua i llum. Seven thousand million combinations of water and light. Note that it says water and light, not water, light and colour — the phrasing gets embellished everywhere and the city’s is the conservative one.

Since 2010 it has run on groundwater, not drinking water, which is the detail that stops the whole thing from being indefensible in a Mediterranean city.

The page describes a machine that is gone

Now the part that made this page worth writing.

The Ajuntament’s technical page, live today, lists 4,760 light bulbs and a total installed electrical power of 3,000 kW.

The Ajuntament’s own press office, in July 2025: s’han substituït els 4.760 focus de llum blanca incandescent per 680 focus LED. Same lighting, it says, with the load dropping de 1.507 kW a 72 kW. Another 380 submerged LED lights went into the basin.

So the spec sheet and the news release, both municipal, describe two different fountains. The 4,760 bulbs are the old machine. What is in there now is 680 LEDs and 380 more underwater, and a load about twenty times smaller.

This is not a scandal, it is a website that did not get updated. But if you are going to quote a number about this fountain, quote the one from 2025.

There is a smaller version of the same problem inside a single page: the prose says 2,600 litres a second, and the data table a few lines below says 2,610. Both are the Ajuntament. We use “about 2,600” and tell you why.

Two and a half years with no water

This is the thing to know if you are planning around it, and it is recent enough that half the guidebooks have not caught up.

Barcelona’s ornamental fountains were switched off in November 2022 because of the drought. The Ajuntament’s phrasing for how long that lasted: l’aturada de dos anys i mig.

In April 2025 the Catalan Water Agency deactivated the hydrological alert on the Ter-Llobregat basin, the city lifted its water restrictions, and the fountains came back in phases by size. The Font Màgica and the Montjuïc cascades were in the group scheduled between June and October 2025.

But the fountain had a second reason for being dry, and the city says so plainly: the stoppage was a causa de la situació de sequera i a les obres de rehabilitació. A three-million-euro refurbishment ran through the same window — the LEDs above, a new remote-control system, renewed circuits — and the city noted that the last major update to the control system dated from the nineteen-nineties.

Water returned on Wednesday 24 September 2025, the day of La Mercè. The city called it l’actualització més rellevant dels últims trenta anys. The sound system was replaced the following April, and the water utility marked that as the end of una de les reformes més importants des dels anys noranta.

What that means for you: this is not the fountain of the photographs from 2019. It is a rebuilt one, six months old at the time of writing, and it is the first thing on Montjuïc where “check the current state before you go” is genuinely the right advice rather than a hedge. We are not printing the timetable — it is seasonal and it moves — but the fountain has a page and it is the fountain’s page you want, not ours.

It has been dark before, three times

The rest of the timeline is a useful corrective to the idea of an unbroken spectacle since 1929.

• 1954–55. Buïgas himself carries out the first restoration, rebuilding elements danyats o desapareguts durant la Guerra Civil i la postguerra, and swapping the hydraulic valve drive for an electro-pneumatic one. Note what the city does not say: it never states that the fountain was destroyed, when it stopped, or when it started again. All we have is damage, and a repair twenty-five years later. We are not going to fill that in.
• 1972 and 1975. Cascades four and three stop working.
• 1993. The fountain is stopped altogether and replaced by a laser show projected onto the Palau Nacional with a water screen. Repairs run October 1996 to June 1997 and October 1997 to June 1998, and the restored fountain reopens on 23 June 1998.
• 2014 onwards. The switch to RGB LED begins, and cascades four, two and one come back in 2014, 2015 and 2016.
• March 2020. Stopped for the covid lockdown; shows only resumed on 1 April 2022, seven months before the drought closed it again.

Between 1993 and 2025 this fountain has spent a striking amount of time not running.

Where it sits, and what it replaced

The fountain stands where Puig i Cadafalch’s Four Columns stood — demolished in 1928, and rebuilt in 2010 a few metres from their original position. One monument was taken down so this one could go up, and then the first one came back next door. It is a small, very Barcelona sequence.

Above it is the Palau Nacional, which the national museum describes as gairebé 50.000 m², with a dome inspired by St Peter’s and four towers inspired by the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. The museum’s own description of its front approach names the fountain: a great staircase from Avinguda de la Reina Maria Cristina, flanquejada a mig camí per les grans fonts lluminoses i monumentals de Carles Buïgas.

That is the axis you walk up. It is also, deliberately, a piece of stagecraft: the fair’s main avenue, designed to be entered.

One naming problem, said out loud

The Ajuntament’s citizen portal calls the 1929 event the Exposició Universal. The Ajuntament’s own press office calls it the Exposició Internacional.

The COAC, the Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana and the national museum all say Internacional, which is the correct name — Barcelona’s Universal Exposition was 1888, in the Ciutadella. The city’s history page for its own fountain has it wrong.

We mention it because it is exactly the kind of small error that gets copied outward from an official page and then becomes what everyone says.

How to use it on a walk

The fountain is at the bottom. Everything else is up.

If you are coming from Plaça d’Espanya, the fountain is the first thing you meet and the temptation is to treat it as the destination. It is better as the end of an afternoon than the start of one — walk up first, come down to it as the light goes.

The way up, the escalators nobody signposts and which of the three cable-car-shaped things is the one you actually want, is how to get to Montjuïc. What the 1929 fair left behind besides this, and which buildings were supposed to come down and did not, is the 1929 Exposition. And the arrival itself — the towers, the bullring, the fountain in the middle of the roundabout — is Plaça d’Espanya, which is a more interesting square than the traffic makes it look.

Our Montjuïc walking tour starts at the foot of the Venetian towers and goes up through the fairground and the castle, told by an actor rather than recited. Whether the hill earns the afternoon at all is is Montjuïc worth it, and the gardens you walk through between the destinations are in their own piece.