They built the roof on the ground and then lifted it forty-five metres into the air

The Olympic stadium gets the visitors, and we have written about it — it is sixty years older than it looks and only its façade is original.

This page is about the four other things standing around it, because they are better, and because the descriptions filed by the architects who built them are more interesting than anything written about them since.

The roof was built on the floor

The Palau Sant Jordi is the big shell with the ribbed dome. Arata Isozaki, project 1985, opened 1990, 17,000 seats.

Here is what the architects’ association archive says about the roof, and it is worth reading slowly:

A central vault 136 metres long by 110 metres wide, assembled on the ground and raised to a height of 45 metres by means of the Panto-Dome system. It is a space frame formed of 4,000 cylindrical bars and 500 spherical nodes.

They laid out an object the size of a large city block on the ground, bolted it together where people could reach it, and then jacked the whole thing up into the air.

That is not a flourish in a brochure. It is the technical file, and it explains the shape of the building: the dome is that curve because that curve is what the assembly could lift.

And there is a reason the building is so compact. The same file says the original site was the Montjuïc rubbish dump, which forced a compact solution to minimise the foundation problem. The site later moved, which allowed a bigger arena with a 200-metre indoor running track — and also changed the roof, which had originally been meant to be corrugated sheet metal.

Barcelona’s most famous piece of 1990s engineering exists in that form because somebody had to build it on a tip.

⚠️ One note of care. The archive spells the system Panto-Dome, with the hyphen. Most sources print it another way, and we have not found an institutional page naming the engineer usually credited with it. We are quoting the file and stopping there.

The tower is a clock

Next to it, the leaning white spike. Santiago Calatrava, 1989–1992, 130 metres.

The archive again:

The inclination of the shaft coincides with the angle of the summer solstice in Barcelona, so that the shadow it casts on the circular platform forms a sundial.

It is a 130-metre gnomon. The lean that everybody reads as a stylistic tic is an astronomical measurement of this specific latitude, and the paved circle it stands on is the dial.

The rest of the description is worth having too. A leaning concrete shaft whose centre of gravity at the base coincides with the vertical resultant of its own weight, resting on three points on a stone-clad circular platform, entered through a 30-metre arch — and closed by a metal door driven by a hydraulic motor whose ninety-degree rotation, the archive says, suggests the effect of an eyelid.

What we could not find out: who it was built for. The archive files it under telecommunications facilities and names no promoter; the encyclopaedia just calls it the communications tower. The company usually named in guidebooks is not on any institutional page we opened, so we are not going to be the ones who put it there.

The two swimming pools, and the name that moved

This is the one that catches everybody, including people who live here.

There are two swimming complexes on this hill, and the architects’ archive keeps them as two separate works at two separate addresses:

• Piscines Municipals de Montjuïc — Avinguda de Miramar 31, 1929, Josep Serra Robert
• Piscines Bernat Picornell — Avinguda de l’Estadi 38, 1988–1991, Franc Fernández and Moisés Gallego

The pool in every photograph of Barcelona — the diving platform with the whole city laid out behind it — is the 1929 one, on Miramar. It is not the Picornell.

And now the name. The Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana, in its entry on Bernat Picornell — founder of the Club de Natació Barcelona in 1907, referee of the first water-polo match recorded in Spain in 1908 — says he secured the 1970 European swimming championships for Barcelona, held at the municipal pools of Montjuïc, to which the name of Bernat Picornell had been given.

He died that same year, on 27 September 1970.

So the name was attached to one set of pools, and today it belongs to a different building four hundred metres away. We have not found an institution that narrates the move, and we are flagging that rather than smoothing it over — but the two files and the encyclopaedia entry are all public, and they do not line up the way the story is usually told.

One more thing the archive says about the Picornell, and it is unusually candid for a technical file. Of the old pools practically nothing remains; the basins are new; only the old spectator stands survive — proof that behind a hypothetical restoration what was really built was a new building for swimming.

That sentence could have been written about half of Montjuïc. It is the same argument as the Mies pavilion, which is legally a new building, and the stadium, which kept a wall.

The building with two cloisters

The INEFC, Ricard Bofill, 1989–1991, on Avinguda de l’Estadi — the sports-science school, and the most un-Olympic thing in the Olympic ring.

The archive describes it plainly: the gymnasia are housed in two cloisters joined by a central hall, and the building has seventeen classrooms, a weights room, a wrestling room, two courts, a sauna, a library and a lecture hall, with a flight of steps linking the south façade to the outdoor courts.

Two cloisters. A monastery plan, with weights in it, built in 1990 for a school of physical education. Whatever you think of Bofill’s classicism, it is the only building up here that is deliberately arguing with the 1929 exposition next door rather than with the Games.

It was all one drawing

Worth knowing, because the ring reads as a collection: it is registered as a single urban plan.

Ordenació de l’Anella Olímpica de Montjuïc, 1984–1992, by Correa Milá Arquitectes with Carles Buxadé, Federico Correa, Joan Margarit and Alfonso Milá.

Four of those names, with Vittorio Gregotti, also did the 1986–1989 stadium refit that kept only the façade. So the same office laid out the ground, gutted the 1929 stadium, and set the plinths that Isozaki and Calatrava then built on. The two famous foreign architects were guests inside somebody else’s plan.

The council’s current name for the flat open space in the middle is the Esplanada Olímpica, which is worth knowing because other names circulate for it and we could not verify any of them.

What is about to happen to all of it

In July 2025 the Ajuntament announced the first phase of a remodelling, and put numbers on it: 70 million euros for the Sant Jordi Club, funded entirely from the commercial profits of the municipal company BSM, turning it into a 16,500 square metre hall with flexible capacities between 3,500 and 9,000, through an international architecture competition. The same note describes the Palau Sant Jordi as a space of Barcelona internationally recognised also for its heritage value, and records more than two million spectators and more than 170 events across 2023 and 2024.

⚠️ Announced plans are not built buildings, and we have no idea whether that competition will produce anything you recognise. The wider plan for the hill is worth reading with the same caution.

Standing there

It is a fifteen-minute walk across the whole ring and most people do it in the wrong order. Come from the stadium, and the sequence that pays is: the tower first, in the middle of the day, when the shadow is doing its job on the paving; then the esplanade, which is the only place on Montjuïc where the twentieth century wins outright; then down past the Picornell to the 1929 pools on Miramar for the view everyone else photographs from the wrong side.

Whether the whole hill earns your day is a separate question, and the ways up and down decide how much of it you actually see.

Our Montjuïc walk goes on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. It passes the ring rather than lingering in it, because the mountain’s older layers — the quarries, the cemetery, the castle — take the time. We are closed on 25 December and 1 January.