Poble Espanyol

Poble Espanyol — the Spanish Village — is 117 full-scale reproductions of buildings from across Spain, laid out as a walkable town on the side of Montjuïc. Older accounts say "over 100 different styles"; it is 117 buildings, and the number comes from the village itself.

It was built between 1926 and 1929 for the International Exposition, meant to be demolished afterwards, and never was.

Who made it

It was the idea of the architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch, who was running the exposition, and it was designed by Francesc Folguera and Ramon Reventós with the art critic Miquel Utrillo and the painter Xavier Nogués. The four of them travelled the country photographing and measuring buildings worth copying, and the result is a serious piece of architectural documentation disguised as an attraction.

Entry is through a reproduction of the Puerta de San Vicente from the walls of Ávila, which sets the tone: the point is not to be convincing, it is to be legible. Beyond it the lanes are arranged by region — Castile, Aragon, Andalucia, Galicia, the Basque Country, Catalonia, the Balearics — so that the whole architectural geography of Spain can be walked in an hour.

The centre is the Plaça Major, with a copy of the Mudéjar clock tower of Utebo in Aragon, and a town hall, a church and a monastery around it.

What it is now

The site covers more than forty thousand square metres, and it holds a good deal more than a museum would.

  • Craft workshops — glassblowing, ceramics, leather, textiles — worked in front of visitors, which is the part children remember.
  • Eighteen shops and eleven places to eat and drink.
  • The Museu Fran Daurel, with more than three hundred works — Picasso, Dalí, Miró, Tàpies, Barceló — and a sculpture garden. Note that Antoni Tàpies, whom older accounts call "lesser known outside Spain", is one of the most internationally significant European painters of the later twentieth century and has a foundation of his own in the Eixample.
  • The Tablao de Carmen, a flamenco dinner show running since 1988 and named for Carmen Amaya, the Barcelona-born dancer who is the greatest flamenco performer the city produced. She danced here for the king at the 1929 exposition, as a child, which is why the tablao bears her name.
  • Three nightclubs, including a long-established open-air summer one. The village stays open late — to midnight most of the year — and the evening is a quite different proposition from the afternoon.

It opens every day of the year, with reduced hours for a few weeks after Christmas.

Whether it is worth it

Honest answer: it depends what is wanted. It is a reproduction, it is privately run, it charges, and anyone expecting a Spanish village will find a very well-made facsimile of one.

But it is also the only place to see the vernacular architecture of the whole peninsula side by side, the craft workshops are real, and it is the easiest introduction to Spain's regional variety for anyone whose trip is confined to Catalonia. It is a short walk from the MNAC and the Magic Fountain, so it fits into a Montjuïc day without a detour.

General practicalities for the city are on the Barcelona page.

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