The bullring closed twenty-one years before bullfighting was banned, and the ban was struck down anyway

Plaça d’Espanya is a roundabout with a metro station under it and a lot of buses on it, and almost everybody crosses it on the way to somewhere else.

That is a fair reaction. It is also the front door of the 1929 fair, and it contains the building people in Barcelona are most confidently wrong about.

The towers

Two brick towers, 44 metres high according to the Ajuntament’s own city guide, by Ramon Reventós i Farrarons.

They are the access towers to the Exposition — the gateposts. Everything behind them was staged to be entered between them.

Two small cautions. The city guide dates them 1929; the architects’ register dates the work 1927. Almost certainly project and completion, but neither source says which, so the safe phrasing is designed in 1927 for the 1929 fair.

And the name. Everyone calls them the Venetian towers, and the COAC records that only as an alternative denomination, not as the title. We could not find any institution stating that they are modelled on the campanile of St Mark’s — which is the reason for the nickname and appears nowhere official. Popularly Venetian, then, and unattributed.

The fountain in the middle, and two credits

The monumental fountain in the centre of the roundabout is registered by the COAC as the Font Commemorativa de l’Exposició Internacional de 1929, dated 1928–1929, by Josep Maria Jujol — Gaudí’s most brilliant collaborator, the man behind the bench at Park Güell and much of the ironwork at Casa Batlló. The Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana agrees, singling it out among his later works for its urban scale.

But the same encyclopaedia, in its entry for the sculptor Miquel Blay — the man who carved Cançó popular on the Palau de la Música — lists among his principal works la font de la plaça d’Espanya, de Barcelona. Flatly, the fountain.

The obvious reconciliation is Jujol the architecture, Blay the figures. It is very probably right. Neither source actually says it, so we are giving you both credits and telling you the division is our reading, not theirs.

Other sculptors get attached to this fountain online. We found none of them in any acceptable source.

And now the bullring

The circular building on the far side is Les Arenes, and the story attached to it is wrong in a way that is easy to check.

The building first. August Font i Carreras signed the plans on 30 September 1899; the ring is dated 1899–1900. The COAC’s file describes it as obra vista d’estil mudèjar, three storeys, a horseshoe arch over the main entrance, and gives the dimensions: 97 metres across the whole ring, 52 metres of sand, 15,600 spectators. The name refers to the sand of Roman amphitheatres.

Now the part everyone gets wrong. The sequence people recite is: Catalonia banned bullfighting, so the bullring became a shopping centre.

The COAC’s file on the conversion says the old ring had been en desús des del 1989 — out of use since 1989.

The Catalan prohibition is Ley 28/2010, of 3 August 2010, which amended the animal protection law to ban las corridas de toros y los espectáculos con toros que incluyan la muerte del animal, in force from 1 January 2012.

So the building fell silent twenty-one years before the ban took effect, and the conversion — by Alonso i Balaguer with Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners — is dated by the COAC from 1991. The project predates the law by nearly two decades.

And the ban itself did not last. The Constitutional Court’s judgment 177/2016, of 20 October 2016, resolved to declarar inconstitucional y nulo el art. 1 de la Ley del Parlamento de Cataluña 28/2010. It was struck down on competence grounds, over historical heritage and culture.

There is a further wrinkle in the judgment that almost nobody carries, and it is the one that explains why nothing changed on the ground: the court records that Catalan law had already restricted bullfights to permanent rings that were operating before the animal protection law came in — desde la entrada en vigor de la Ley 3/1988, de 4 de marzo. The 2010 ban was annulled into a legal landscape that was already narrow.

None of which is a position on bullfighting. It is a correction to a causal story that gets told on this pavement several times an hour.

What the conversion did add is worth two minutes: the site sits about four metres above the surrounding streets, and the roof carries a perimeter walkway 27 metres up with more than 300 linear metres of route. It is one of the better free views in the city, and it looks straight at the thing you are about to climb.

Reading the axis before you climb it

This is what the square is actually for.

Stand between the towers and look up. Avinguda de la Reina Maria Cristina runs away from you, the Magic Fountain sits at the top of it, and above that the Palau Nacional — which the national museum describes as almost 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 approach names the sequence: a great staircase from the avenue, flanquejada a mig camí per les grans fonts lluminoses i monumentals de Carles Buïgas.

Towers, avenue, fountain, staircase, palace. That is a single designed shot, and it only exists from down here. Ten minutes at the bottom of it is worth more than most of what people do at the top.

Practical, without anything that goes stale

The escalators up the axis are being replaced — the city announced the substitution of 22 escalators on Montjuïc in October 2024, with works staged so that the busiest ones, including those on Avinguda Reina Maria Cristina, are not all out at once. Assume something is closed and take the next flight.

Which of the three cable-car-shaped things you actually want, and where the free escalators hide, is how to get to Montjuïc. What the 1929 fair left behind is the 1929 Exposition; the best of it, two minutes to your left, is the Mies pavilion and the Casaramona factory.

Our Montjuïc walking tour meets at the foot of these towers and goes up through the fairground, the castle and the quarry behind it, told by an actor rather than recited. And whether the hill deserves the half day: is Montjuïc worth it.