The city calls this the third great transformation of Montjuïc, and it has been counting from 1929

On 26 February 2025 the mayor of Barcelona gave his annual lecture in the Fundació Miró, which is on this hill, and spent it describing what the city intends to do to the hill.

He called it the third great transformation of Montjuïc, after the 1929 exposition and the 1992 Games.

That is a large claim and it deserves to be treated as a claim rather than as news. What follows is the list, the money, the caveats, and the two lines in it that change something for anyone going up there this year.

The numbers, as published

What	Money	When the council said
Plaça d’Espanya pedestrian axis	10 M€	After the L8 works finish
Fira, new congress hall, Maria Cristina as a promenade; MNAC into the Pavelló de Victòria Eugènia; Palau d’Esports recovered; 500 public homes	460 M€	Over the coming decade
Olympic ring	370 M€	Over five years
Historic gardens	8.8 M€	Over two years
22 escalators replaced	7.8 M€	Begun 2024, ending 2026
Magic Fountain control, sound and light	3 M€	Under way
Groundwater network	7 M€	—
Morrot, phase one, led by the Port	10 M€	Finishing 2027
Ronda Litoral at port level, by the Ministry	98 M€	2035 horizon
Marina del Prat Vermell, up to 12,000 homes	338 M€	Over ten years

Plus the surrounding neighbourhoods: 21 M€ for the Passeig de la Zona Franca, 24 M€ for a park at the Tres Xemeneies, 4 M€ for the streets of the Turó de la Font de la Guatlla, and Pla de Barris money of 15 M€ in Poble-sec and 8 M€ in the Marina.

We are printing the table because a plan that is only ever described in adjectives cannot be checked. This one can.

The one number in it that is actually useful today

Buried near the end, describing work already started:

The replacement of the 22 escalators that make the mountain more accessible, with 30 million uses a year.

That is, as far as we can find, the only published figure of any kind about how many people move around Montjuïc. Nobody counts visitors to the hill. The city counts escalator rides.

Be careful with it, because it is easy to misuse. Thirty million uses, not people — one person going up the escalator chain from Plaça d’Espanya to the MNAC uses several. It measures one route on one face of the mountain, and it counts residents, commuters and the people going to the Fira along with everybody else.

But it is a real municipal number, it is dated, and it is more than exists for La Rambla, where the official footfall figure does not exist at all.

The replacements run to 2026, which is the other reason to know about them: the escalators are how a lot of people get up this hill, and some of them have been out of service while this happens.

The gardens, and what the list tells you about the mountain

8.8 million euros over two years, and the council’s own inventory of what it means by the historic gardens is worth quoting because it doubles as a route:

the gardens and spaces created a century ago for the 1929 International Exposition, the Umbracle gardens, those of Laribal and those of the Teatre Grec. The great avenues, Miramar, de l’Estadi and Ferrer i Guàrdia, not forgetting the Forestier axis, the Font Màgica and the Sot de la Foixarda.

Read that as a list of what the city thinks is irreplaceable up here, written by the people who pay for it. It is almost entirely 1929, and it is almost entirely landscape rather than buildings — which is the argument we make about the gardens anyway, now with a budget line attached.

⚠️ The city cannot decide what the 1929 exposition was called

In the same press release, four times: Exposició Internacional de 1929.

Once, describing the Fira works: the commemoration of the centenary of the Exposició Universal de 1929.

Barcelona’s 1929 fair was an International Exposition. Its Universal Exposition was 1888, in the Ciutadella, and it is a different event forty-one years earlier.

This is a small slip in one document and we are not making a scandal of it. We are pointing at it because it is exactly how a wrong fact enters circulation: an institutional page says it once, a hundred pages copy the sentence, and within a year «Barcelona’s 1929 Universal Exposition» is something everybody knows. What the 1929 exposition actually was is on its own page, and it was International.

The metro, which is the part everyone will ask about

The plan is to extend line L2 to Montjuïc, and on through the Marina del Prat Vermell, the administrative district and the Fira to the Parc Logístic, where it would join L9 for the airport.

No opening date was given, and we are not going to supply one. An urban metro extension announced in a mayoral lecture is a statement of intent; the tunnel is a separate matter.

What was announced with more precision is the interim: a bus line X3 from the Paral·lel and Plaça d’Espanya with stops at the Olympic ring, carrer Foc and the Fira, and the renaming of line 150 as the Montjuïc Bus.

If you are working out how to get up there, the six ways and their traps is the page, and it is the one to trust over this one, because it describes what exists.

The Morrot, which nobody talks about and is the biggest idea in the list

Four kilometres of edge between the mountain and the port — the strip you look down on from the Mirador and never think about, because it is container terminal, rail and dual carriageway.

Two phases. The first, led by the Port of Barcelona, was stated to finish in 2027 at 10 million euros, producing a road at port level for public transport, pedestrians and bicycles. The second, by the Ministry of Transport, extends the Ronda Litoral at port level at 98 million euros on a 2035 horizon, turning the existing ring road into a promenade.

If that happens, the relationship between this hill and the water changes for the first time since the port was industrialised. It is also the item most likely to slip, which is why it is at the bottom of the press release rather than the top.

What to be sceptical about, and what not to

Be sceptical about dates. Nothing here is under construction on the strength of a lecture, most of it is a decade out, and the last two transformations of this mountain — 1929 and 1992 — both had immovable deadlines attached, which is precisely what this one does not.

Be sceptical about the audience figures. In February 2025 the council wrote that the Olympic ring’s venues already receive more than a million spectators a year. In July 2025 it wrote that they had held more than two million spectators and more than 170 events across 2023 and 2024. Both are its own numbers, five months apart, and it does not reconcile them.

Do not be sceptical about the intent. The money for the escalators, the gardens, the fountain and the groundwater is described as work already begun, and the Sant Jordi Club competition was launched in July 2025 with 70 million euros from the municipal company’s own commercial profits. Whatever happens to the rest, this hill is being spent on.

And note what is missing. There is nothing in this plan about managing visitors, because Montjuïc is the one major destination in Barcelona that residents have not withdrawn from — 2.1 % on the city’s avoidance list, last of everything. The council’s crowd-recovery programme runs in the Eixample and Ciutat Vella. It does not run here. A transformation this size is the sort of thing that changes that, and nobody has said what happens if it does.

Where to stand while it happens

The parts of Montjuïc worth your afternoon are, almost without exception, the parts that are not in this plan: the quarries, the cemetery, the Jewish necropolis, the Fossar de la Pedrera, the castle. None of them is getting 370 million euros, and none of them needs it.

Our Montjuïc walk is on those, on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, two and a half hours. We are closed on 25 December and 1 January.

And if you are choosing whether the hill is worth the trip at all before any of this happens, that argument is here.