The major project for the next term in Barcelona is beginning to take shape. The municipal company BIMSA will tender the works to connect the tram through the Diagonal this week. The goal is for the work to begin this summer with the target that, barring any setbacks, the tram will be operating by the year 2031. In between, there will be forty months of construction during which at least two lanes of traffic in each direction will be maintained at all times between Passeig de Gràcia and Avinguda Sarrià. The bike lane will also remain active.

Barcelona is about to culminate the transformation of its coastline that it began following the Olympic Games. The reform of the last stretch of the Seafront on which it had been working for years is beginning to see the light. You only need to approach the seafront between Mar Bella and the Forum these days to see how the city's new Promenade is beginning to take shape. In the final stretch of Josep Pla street, the city's new seafront is already completely visible.

Barcelona is preparing for a very uncertain All Saints' Eve. While some merchants are still recovering from Saturday's destruction, the city is already shielding itself against the threat of another Blocus call. This Friday morning on Passeig de Gràcia, some shop windows could already be seen completely boarded up with wooden panels, and others with workers busy protecting them. Similar images were also being repeated in other parts of the city, such as Plaça Francesc Macià.

Mobility headaches seem to be unstoppable when it comes to accessing Barcelona. The problems have now also reached an infrastructure that had proven more reliable until now: the metro. A crack in the slab on which the tracks rest, caused by the pressure of groundwater in a tunnel between the Artigues-Sant Adrià and Sant Roc stations, will force the closure of the metro line 2 section between Gorg and La Pau from November 2 to December 3.

Perhaps you remember the therians. For a few days last February, these teenagers who supposedly identified with animals and acted as such monopolized the conversation. Many articles and hours of radio and television were dedicated to analyzing this phenomenon, which until then no one had ever heard of. Today we know that rather than young people who thought they were kittens, the therians were lab mice. Let me explain.

Exactly one year ago, the Vila de Gràcia in Barcelona confirmed that it was definitively losing the Ona bookstore, one of the most iconic in the area. These days, the neighborhood has seen how the commemoration of that event coincided with the opening of a new establishment that, unintentionally, has become a symbol of how the city's commercial landscape is transforming. In the premises where the bookstore used to be, at 217 Gran de Gràcia street, a new 24-hour supermarket is now open.

They have been long-awaited, but the work to complete the tram connection along the Diagonal will begin, barring any last-minute unforeseen events, this summer. This was announced by the Mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, in an interview with SER Catalunya, in which he detailed that the City Council's government commission approved this Thursday the necessary financial allocation of 120 million euros to carry out the work, which will be put out to tender in "two or three" weeks.

The eleventh Summit organized by Barcelona Oberta is titled The Barcelona that could be. An idea that does not hide a certain dissatisfaction with the city as it is today. "It is a provocative title," admits the president of the organization, Gabriel Jené, right at the start, and it is soon proven that it undoubtedly generates debate. The Barcelona that could be according to the mayor, Jaume Collboni, and several of the speakers participating in the event do not quite match up.

Traditionally, the main source of discord among the residents of the Les Corts neighborhood in Barcelona has been Camp Nou and the impact on mobility in the area on match days. For some time now, however, in the vicinity of the Barça stadium, the debate that ignites the most passion is not football, nor the refereeing, nor even the construction work on the 'blaugrana' stadium. The great element of division is a tree: the Ginkgo biloba.

Catalonia is once again suffering a critical rainstorm. The downpours this Saturday evening have fallen mainly in the Vallès Oriental and Maresme areas, where what is, for now, the most serious incident of this storm has occurred. A team made up of the Generalitat Fire Department, Mossos d'Esquadra, and Maritime Rescue is working on the search for a woman who, according to several witnesses, reportedly fell into the stream in Cabrera de Mar shortly before eight in the evening. The operation continued throughout the night and is continuing this Sunday morning, expanding the search radius to the river mouth at the sea.

Until recently, getting the residents of the Sagrada Família and the temple to agree seemed like an impossible mission. Now, however, the Barcelona City Council has achieved it twice over. On one hand, because before the summer it reached a nascent agreement regarding the impact that the staircase of the Glory façade would have on the buildings in front, which satisfied both parties. On the other hand, because since then it has maintained a silence that is making both sides of the negotiation impatient, and they are pressuring it to take a position now.

One of the most characteristic images of the access to Barcelona from the Diagonal is living on borrowed time. The RACC offices, with their iconic yellow cube at the top, will have to change location. The reason? The land on which the building stands is included in the draft of the Urban Master Plan (PDU) for the future Clínic Campus. For this reason, the Generalitat and the company have been negotiating an agreement for months for the RACC to abandon its privileged spot at the top of the Diagonal.

In the summer of 2023, a strong storm suddenly left Barcelona in the dark and put cyclists at risk during the start of the Vuelta a España, which was taking place from the Catalan capital. At the time, the City Council explained that it could not act because the darkness was "unforeseen" and because a significant part of the system was very rigid and could only be turned on early manually. Now this situation can no longer happen again: since this summer, all the city's lights can be controlled remotely with a single switch.

The images of the Besòs river full to the brim and about to overflow a week ago have been one of the most prominent photographs left by the storm of recent days on the Catalan coast. A scene that had not been seen for decades and that not only made many in the area remember tragedies like the 1962 flood, but also put the spotlight back on the urbanization project around the Three Chimneys of Sant Adrià.

The storm this past week has tested the resilience of cities like Barcelona. Between October 3rd and 6th, the Catalan capital recorded 213 liters per square meter, a third of the rain it usually collects in a whole year. The downpours pushed the city's drainage systems to the limit and raised a key question: are large cities prepared for a new model of more aggressive storms? What are they doing and what can they do to protect themselves?

Barcelona City Council deepened its fight this Friday to eliminate tourist apartments in the city. Three days after the Council of Ministers re-approved the two housing decrees that failed in Congress a week ago, the city council's economy commission adopted them to approve an IBI (property tax) increase for the 10,600 tourist apartments in the Catalan capital. An increase that, in some cases, will mean these apartments will pay 2.5 times more in property tax.

Once again, the polls do not smile upon Junts per Barcelona with just over seven months to go until the municipal elections. But far from falling into discouragement, their mayoral candidate, Jordi Martí, presented his candidacy to society this Wednesday with a plea against resignation. "There is a game," he asserted during a speech in which he showed himself willing to turn the polls around and also the dynamic of a city that, he lamented, is not well governed.

Yet another survey, and there have been many, confirms that concern over housing continues to break records in Barcelona. This Wednesday, the City Council made public the 2026 Municipal Services Survey, the most comprehensive one conducted by the Municipal Data Office (OMD), with more than 6,000 in-person interviews. Among those surveyed, 23% identify housing as the most serious problem facing the city, the highest figure in the historical series. This data, moreover, represents an increase of 2.2 points compared to the same survey a year ago, and 15.6 points compared to just five years ago.

"We had never seen anything like it." Residents of the Font del Gos neighborhood in Barcelona were still observing with disbelief this Tuesday morning the devastation that the weekend's downpour caused in the area. From the mountain of mud under which the asphalt of Carrer Torrent de Cal Notari has disappeared, they relived what they defined as one of the most dramatic nights experienced in the area. On the night from Saturday to Sunday, firefighters had to arrive by boat to their homes to rescue six families in danger due to the rising of the torrent. Some were already waiting perched on the roof of their houses, the only place the water did not yet cover.

With the Catalan coast and pre-coastal areas still recovering from the effects of the weekend's downpour, the storm has returned to punish Barcelona and its surroundings this Monday with another extremely strong storm that took everyone by surprise and at times created truly dangerous situations. The Minister of the Interior herself, Núria Parlon, has acknowledged that the situation caught them off guard because, although a situation of atmospheric instability was forecast, an episode of this magnitude was not expected. In addition to numerous ravages, the downpours have left two people missing, whom emergency teams continue to search for.