The most famous thing that happened in this stadium is the one thing nobody will confirm

The Olympic ring is the part of Montjuïc people assume they can skip, on the grounds that they were not at the Games and do not care about athletics.

Go anyway, and go for five minutes at the front of the stadium, because it is the clearest demonstration on the hill of the thing Barcelona keeps doing: the façade is from 1929 and everything behind it is from the 1980s.

The stadium is sixty years older than it looks inside

It was built for the 1929 International Exposition, to a design by Pere Domènech i Roura, and officially inaugurated on 20 May 1929.

The programme that day is worth having, because the short version — a rugby match against Italy — is only a third of it. The stadium’s own history:

officially inaugurated on 20 May 1929 with a rugby match between the national teams of Spain and Italy, three heats of the 100 metres and a football match between the Catalan selection and the English side Bolton Wanderers.

Then, for 1992: the façade was kept and everything behind it rebuilt. The two figures that make it real, both from the stadium:

The level of the original track was lowered by 11 metres and the stone extracted was used for the construction of the temple of the Sagrada Família.

That sentence closes a circle that runs through this whole hill. Montjuïc was Barcelona’s quarry until extraction stopped abruptly in 1957, leaving a basilica still under construction with no source of its own stone. In 1988 the city ceded the Sagrada Família around a thousand cubic metres of Montjuïc stone recovered from this remodelling. The hill was delivered to the church a second time, seventy years after the first — and it came out of an athletics track.

The rebuilt stadium was re-inaugurated on 8 September 1989, with the fifth Athletics World Cup. It was renamed after Lluís Companys in March 2001 — the president of the Catalan government who was shot in the moat of the castle at the top of the same hill in 1940.

The Games that never happened

Before 1992 there was 1936, and it was not an Olympics.

The Olimpíada Popular — the People’s Olympiad — was scheduled in Barcelona for 19 to 26 July 1936, as a protest against the Berlin Games. The Catalan encyclopedia records the details: organised by the Comitè Català pro Esport Popular, with some 6,000 athletes registered, Lluís Companys as honorary president, and an anthem by Josep Maria de Sagarra.

It was suspended as a result of the military uprising of 18 July.

The day before it was due to open. Athletes were already in the city.

Two things we are not going to write, and they are the two things every account of this asserts.

That it was to be held in this stadium. The encyclopedia says only that the city ceded its sports facilities. It does not name the venue, and inferring it is exactly the kind of plausible step that produces a correction later.

That the stadium’s own history mentions it. It does not. What the stadium’s history says about 1936 is something else entirely: in 1936 it served as a refugee centre because of the civil war.

A stadium built for a fair, briefly a shelter for people fleeing, and then empty for fifty years.

1986, and a bid list we are not printing

The stadium gives the date Barcelona won: 17 October 1986, the date on which Barcelona was proclaimed the winner.

We are stopping there. You will read that this happened at an IOC session in Lausanne; we could not confirm the location from the IOC itself, whose own Barcelona 1992 pages do not carry the award date or place in any form we could open.

And there is a harder omission. The stadium publishes a paragraph about Barcelona’s earlier, failed Olympic bids. It contains an error visible on its face — it refers to Amsterdam in 1938, and there were no 1938 Games; Amsterdam hosted in 1928. That is the only institutional account of the failed bids we obtained, and it is demonstrably unreliable, so we are not publishing a list of Barcelona’s failed bids at all until there is a clean source. The story is a good one. It will keep.

The arrow

Here is the famous one, and the honest answer is more interesting than either version.

On 25 July 1992, at the opening ceremony in this stadium, the archer Antonio Rebollo shot a burning arrow towards the cauldron above the stands, and the cauldron lit.

The International Olympic Committee credits him with it: Lighting the Olympic Flame by: Antonio Rebollo — and describes him as a paralympic archer, which is the detail most retellings drop.

And in another of its own pages, the IOC writes about tracking the burning arrow as it flew through the Barcelona night sky past the Olympic cauldron.

Lighting the flame in one sentence, past the cauldron in another. Nowhere does the IOC state that the arrow physically ignited the gas.

So the position is: the IOC credits Rebollo with lighting the flame, the ceremony was built around a flaming arrow, and whether the arrow itself lit it is not settled by any institutional statement we could find. A guide who tells you flatly that the arrow missed and the gas was opened by hand has decided something the IOC has not. So has a guide who tells you flatly that it hit.

That is the single most repeated fact about these Games, and it is open.

What else is up there

• Palau Sant Jordi, by Arata Isozaki, opened 1990. Its interior is not open to visits — the operator says so, and a surprising number of pages say otherwise.
• The communications tower by Santiago Calatrava, 1992. You will read that it is a sundial and that it is aligned to something. We could not find an institution saying so, so it is a tower.
• The Museu Olímpic i de l’Esport Joan Antoni Samaranch, opened in 2007 and run by the Fundació Barcelona Olímpica.
• The cauldron, designed by Ramón Bigas.
• The Genets — the horsemen at the old marathon gate — by Pau Gargallo.

We are not giving dates for the swimming pools or the sports institute. We could not verify them, and this page has enough numbers in it that are real.

What 1992 did to the city

Everybody knows the answer: the seafront, the Olympic village, the ring roads, a city that turned round to face the sea.

We could not source it. The Ajuntament pages that would state it were not reachable, and everything else on the subject is journalism and memory. It is almost certainly true and it is not on this page, which is a slightly absurd sentence to write and a rule worth keeping.

Is it worth your afternoon

As a stop on the way, yes. It is on the walk between the fairground and the castle, you can walk in for nothing on most days, and standing on that empty terracing above an eleven-metre hole is a better five minutes than the photograph suggests.

As a destination, no, unless the Games mean something to you personally. It is a working venue, not a monument, and the hill has a national museum, a fortress and a mass grave competing for the same hours — see is Montjuïc worth it.

With children, yes, and it is one of the few things up here that is straightforwardly good with them.

Why our walk passes and does not stop long

Our Montjuïc walking tour takes the hill in the order it happened — the fair, then the castle, then the quarry behind — and the Olympic ring belongs to that sequence as the moment the fairground got used again, sixty years later, by keeping one wall and throwing the rest away.

Which is the same operation the old city ran on itself in the 1920s and 30s, on a smaller scale and with better lighting.

Getting up here: how to get to Montjuïc.

What the 1929 fair left at the bottom of the same axis — the towers, the bullring and the fountain — is Plaça d’Espanya.

The four buildings around the stadium have their own page: a roof assembled on the ground and lifted forty-five metres, and a tower that is a sundial.