The gardens on Montjuïc are the reason people who live here come up the hill

Barcelona’s tourism survey says just over half of the city’s visitors get up Montjuïc. Most of them are going to the castle, the fountain or the museum, and they walk past the thing the people who live here actually come up for.

The hill is largely garden. Most of it is free, none of it is queued, and the gardens are shaped the way they are for a reason that is not landscaping.

Why they are in holes

Because the holes were there first.

Montjuïc was Barcelona’s quarry for two thousand years, and when the stone ran out the city was left with a mountain full of enclosed hollows with their own microclimates. Two of the best gardens on the hill sit in the bottom of exhausted quarries, and the historic botanical garden hides — in the museum’s own phrase — in two old holes of the Foixarda quarry, where the cool microclimate lets Eurosiberian species grow.

Once you know that, walking Montjuïc changes. You stop reading the sunken gardens as design and start reading them as absence.

The one to do if you only do one

Jardins de Mossèn Costa i Llobera — the cactus and succulent garden, on the seaward flank above the port.

The Ajuntament describes it as a joint project between the architect Joaquim Maria Casamor and Joan Pañella, the gardening-school master who was the specialist in succulents. It was inaugurated in 1970 and covers 3.16 hectares, in the bottom of an exhausted quarry.

And there is a superlative, which we will hand you carefully because the city states it two different ways. The garden’s own page says it is one of the gardens specialising in cacti and succulents most important in Europe. The city’s general Montjuïc page says in the world. We are using the garden’s own wording, which is the more conservative of the two, and we are telling you the other exists.

On the date, the same thing: its own page says March 1970 and the neighbouring garden’s page says 22 June 1970. Both say 1970. We are printing 1970.

The other one that was made in a quarry

Jardins de Mossèn Cinto Verdaguer, inaugurated on 22 June 1970 — the same day as Costa i Llobera and Joan Maragall, all three named after Catalan poets.

This one is bulbs, rhizomes and water. The beds cover 2,800 m² and the city plants some 80,000 bulbs a year in them; the aquatic collection lives in around thirty small linked pools.

It is the garden that changes most between visits, for the obvious reason, and the one where you are most likely to be alone.

The botanical garden, and the dump underneath it

The Jardí Botànic de Barcelona opened in 1999, after an ideas competition in 1989, and it was designed by Carlos Ferrater, Bet Figueras and Josep Lluís Canosa.

Its organising idea is genuinely unusual and worth knowing before you walk in: the garden shows the vegetation of the five regions of the world with a Mediterranean climate, which the museum names as Australia, South Africa, California, the Mediterranean basin and Chile. You are not walking through a plant collection. You are walking through the same climate, five times, on four continents.

The architects’ catalogue supplies the detail nobody puts on a sign. It covers about fourteen hectares, and the land it was built on for the last hundred years was a dump for waste of every kind.

A rubbish tip, turned into a demonstration of convergent evolution. It is the most Montjuïc thing on the hill.

The historic one, which is a different place

Do not confuse it with the Jardí Botànic Històric, further down and behind the museum, which is where the story starts.

Pius Font i Quer was commissioned to make a botanical garden in the wake of the 1929 Exposition and began in 1930, in the museum’s phrase, with more will than money, assembling a notable collection of endemic and rare plants from the Iberian peninsula, the Balearics and Morocco.

It was formally inaugurated on 17 July 1941. It was closed in 1986, when the works to build accesses for the new Olympic facilities seriously affected the stability of its vertical walls — the quarry walls. It reopened in October 2003, but only the Sot de l’Estany sector, and the metropolitan authority has maintained it since November 2004.

Check before you go. The museum currently reports the Sot de l’Estany temporarily closed after a landslide. That is the kind of notice that changes, which is exactly why we are sending you to their page rather than printing a state of affairs.

The one that used to be a funfair

Jardins de Joan Brossa, up near the castle side.

There was an amusement park on Montjuïc from 1966. It closed in 1998, and in 2000 the city decided to build the present public gardens on the site; the work was done in 2001 and 2002 by Patrizia Falcone and Rosa Maria Torra Reventós.

The good detail is that four sculptures from the funfair were kept where they stood: a clown by Joaquim Ros i Sabaté (1972), a Carmen Amaya by Josep Cañas (1966), a Charlot by Núria Tortras (1972) and a Joaquim Blume by Nicolau Ortiz (1966).

So you are walking through a wood and you come across a 1972 clown, and it is not an art installation. It is what is left of a fairground.

The oldest ones, from the fair

Jardins de Laribal are the gardens that came with the 1929 Exposition, and they are the ones with the terraces, the water staircases and the tiled benches.

The city bought the estate from Josep Laribal in 1908. The landscaping was commissioned by Francesc Cambó — one of the Exposition’s commissioners — to the French landscape engineer Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier, with his young assistant Nicolau M. Rubió i Tudurí, and the Ajuntament says they created here a new Mediterranean landscape style.

Two things to look for. The Font del Gat, whose cat’s head was sculpted by Joan Antoni Homs in 1918 — and whose name no institution we can find will explain. And the staircase Forestier designed inspired by the one in the gardens of the Generalife to link the top of the park to the Greek Theatre gardens.

One internal wrinkle, said out loud: the Ajuntament’s page dates the gardens finished in 1922 while framing them as work for a fair held in 1929. Both sentences are on the same page. The sensible reading is that Forestier and Rubió i Tudurí worked here in the long run-up, and we are not going to smooth it into a single year.

The one you will probably find closed

Jardins de Joan Maragall, around the Palauet Albéniz, behind the national museum.

They started as the gardens Forestier designed around the royal pavilion built for the 1929 Exposition. The Palauet itself is a neoclassical building of 1929 by the architect Joan Moya, enlarged and remodelled in 1970; the gardens were enlarged and renamed after Joan Maragall the same year, and hold thirty-two sculptures.

They are also, in the city’s own words, closed to the public on certain occasions, because the Palauet is the Spanish royal family’s residence in Barcelona and the gardens shut for official events. Opening is limited to particular days, which we are not printing because they move. If it matters to your afternoon, check first.

How many are there

We do not know, and nor does anyone else who has published it.

The Ajuntament’s Montjuïc page lists eight featured parks, and it says featured. That is a selection, not a total. Every page that gives you a round number for the gardens of Montjuïc got it from somewhere that also did not know.

Fitting them into an afternoon

They are not a destination in themselves for a visitor with three days. They are what makes the walk between the destinations worth doing instead of taking the bus.

The sequence that works: come up from Plaça d’Espanya, and instead of taking the escalators the whole way, cut into Laribal — you get the terraces, the Font del Gat and the Generalife staircase, and you arrive at the Greek Theatre from above.

From the top of the funicular to the castle is a twenty to twenty-five minute walk, uphill, and it goes through Joan Brossa and Mossèn Cinto Verdaguer. That is the walk to choose over the cable car if your legs are willing, and it is set out in how to get to Montjuïc.

Costa i Llobera is the outlier: it is low down on the sea side, near the port cable-car station, and it is worth going out of your way for. If you come down over the harbour at the end of the day, it is on the way.

Where this sits in the hill

The gardens are the counterweight to the rest of it. An afternoon on Montjuïc that takes in the castle and the Fossar de la Pedrera is a couple of hours of political violence, honestly told, and it should be. Walking between them through a cactus garden in an old quarry is not a distraction from that. It is the same hill doing the other thing it does.

Our Montjuïc walking tour goes up through the fairground, the castle and the quarry behind it, and uses the garden paths between them rather than the road, because the road tells you nothing.

Whether the hill earns the afternoon at all: is Montjuïc worth it. And if what you want is the parts of Barcelona its visitors do not reach, most of this page qualifies — see non-touristy things to do in Barcelona.

Below all of them, at the foot of the escalators, is the district that grew on the seaward flank because the Eixample plan did not reach it: Poble-sec and the Paral·lel.

The Greek Theatre at the top of Laribal is part of a cluster of four theatres, none of which was built to be one where it stands: the Ciutat del Teatre.