Barcelona 2000-2025: the global boom

BarcelonaFew places capture the change Barcelona has undergone in the last 25 years as well as Barceloneta beach. Sitting on its sand, you can observe the city's most recent physical mutation—with the Vela Hotel, the Diagonal Mar skyscrapers, or the Fòrum solar panel on the horizon redefining the city.skyline–, but also that transformation less evident at first glance, which allows us to see how during the first quarter of the 21st century the impact of globalization has decisively changed the Catalan capital.

Today on Barceloneta beach, the comings and goings of riders Transporting hamburgers and vans loaded with packages purchased online are symptoms of a different world where you don't have to strain your ears too much to hear a dozen languages spoken by tourists, but also by locals who have arrived from all over the world. A quick check on a mobile phone—now omnipresent, then anecdotal and without internet—will allow us to quantify this transformation. This is the objective of this article, which, on the eve of La Mercè 2025, aims to analyze how Barcelona has changed in a quarter of a century.

Because it's true that these last two and a half decades in the Catalan capital have had little to do with the last twenty-five years of the 20th century. Then, the restoration of democracy first and the Olympic euphoria later turned the city, which had witnessed monumental projects such as the creation of the ring roads, upside down. There have also been major urban development projects, such as the extension of Diagonal Avenue to the sea or the redevelopment of Glòries, but the major changes are not explained by the city's appearance, but by the daily lives of its inhabitants.

A more diverse city

According to the latest census data, 1,733,130 people live in Barcelona today, the highest number in the last forty years. With the birth rate at its lowest level in the last hundred years—only 11,091 births in 2024—the surge is explained by the wave of migration. While in 2000 there were 74,169 registered residents of the Catalan capital who were born abroad, now there are 611,988 of 182 different nationalities. From representing 5% of the population, they have now risen to 35%. These newcomers, in a distinctive feature of the times, also come from wealthier countries to study or work in the city. At the University of Barcelona (UB) alone, 11,627 foreign students were enrolled in the 2024-2025 academic year; in 2000, there were 2,672.

Population and tourism

The explosion of tourism is another key factor without which Barcelona's evolution over the last twenty-five years cannot be understood. Around 2004, while the city continued its commitment to major events and hosted the Forum of Cultures, the subway was filled with advertisements in which clouds winked at you while encouraging you to travel to Rome for little more than the cost of the bus to Almacelles. These were the beginnings of low-cost airlines. Similar posters must have appeared in other cities around the world, because overnight the Catalan capital was also filled with visitors.

In this area, the data is overwhelming. Today, the city welcomes more tourists via cruise ships alone (3.6 million in 2024) than it received in total in 2000. The Catalan capital closed that year with 3.1 million visitors. Now it receives 15.6 million. A boom that has had ramifications in the hotel sector—442 hotels today compared to 170 at the beginning of the century—and which, also thanks to the explosion of platforms, has created phenomena such as tourist apartments—more than 10,000 currently—which the City Council hopes to close by 2028.

Tourist pressure is one factor (but not the only one) that explains another element that will define this first quarter of a century: the housing crisis. Today, a rental apartment in Barcelona is hard to find, and its average price is around 1,147 euros. Almost triple what it cost in 2000.

The arrival of mass tourism has also changed the appearance of the city's streets, where businesses primarily aimed at visitors, such as 24-hour supermarkets, souvenir shops, and cannabis stores, have been reaping the benefits. It has also been a time of the rise of major global brands, which now have stores on main streets and avenues around the world, including those in the Catalan capital.

The commitment to knowledge

Globalization has blurred borders, also facilitating the movement of international capital. Barcelona has more than doubled its GDP in these twenty-five years—from 41.465 billion in 2000 to more than 103,000 in 2023, the latest available data. This data is largely due to the tourism boom, but also to the commitment to hosting trade fairs and conferences, with 734,818 attendees in 2023 according to the city's statistical yearbook, practically triple the number in 2000. The knowledge economy also plays a significant role. Among the city's achievements of the first quarter of a century are the inauguration of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and the Biomedical Research Park, as well as laying the seed for projects that will soon be underway, such as the future Campus Clínic, the Citadel of Knowledge, and the CaixaResearch Institute.

The airport has also undergone its first expansion in the last twenty-five years, with the opening of Terminal 1 in 2009. This infrastructure is now scheduled for upgrade, and it has led to record-breaking passenger numbers. Today, more than 55 million passengers pass through the airport each year; in 2000, it was 19.3 million.

The car loses prominence

The first quarter of the 21st century has also brought about some paradigm shifts in the city. The car is one of the clearest examples. In 2023, there were 471,814 cars in Barcelona, 150,000 fewer than in 2000. During this time, the city has gained 430 hectares of sidewalks and almost 250 hectares of urban greenery. Main streets in the Eixample, such as Consell de Cent, have also been pacified, and the surface parking model has been reversed. The implementation of green areas, which debuted in 2005 in the Eixample and Ciutat Vella, has been extended to the entire city, leaving only 12,727 of the 151,458 free spaces that existed in 2000.

City

Along the way, the Catalan capital has embraced cycling by increasing the number of bike lanes and promoting a new shared mobility model like Bicing. It has also expanded its public transport network by expanding the metro—extending Line 3 to Trinitat Nova and launching Line 10 and part of Line 9—and reintroducing the tram system, which is now planned to connect to Diagonal.

More neighborhoods, more changes

The metro and rail line expansions are another example of the city's priorities in recent years: blurring its boundaries. The city has grown towards the banks of the Besòs River with the construction of the Forum of Cultures and the development of the Diagonal Mar neighborhood and the Poblenou waterfront, and towards the Llobregat River, where thousands of homes are now being built in the Prat Vermell Marina. Furthermore, it has smoothed out intercity highways with the coverage of both ends of the Gran Vía and the work on the Meridiana.

The boost of 22@ or the operation –still unfinished– of the Sagrera are other operations of a city that has also settled in this first quarter of a century its outstanding debt with the Parque de las Glòries, a new green lung of the Catalan capital that has also contributed to a skyline still dominated by an incomplete but increasingly tall Sagrada Família, two iconic buildings: the Torre Glòries and the Design Museum. A transformation of the city that has also left its administrative mark, since Barcelona has had 73 neighborhoods instead of 38 since 2006.

All this in just twenty-five years. A quarter of a century that Onofre Bouvila of the time would portray as times marked by globalization, the technological explosion, or major crises such as the economic crisis or the pandemic. Years in which he would have rushed to withdraw the first euros from ATMs in 2002, which would later gradually disappear. Like the cash machines, sacrificed by the emergence of smartphones. A world where the internet would change the way we interact, entertain, and consume, complicating life in movie theaters (only 21 of the 47 that existed in 2000 remain) and also in bingo halls, where today only a fifth of the tickets sold are sold that were sold twenty-five years ago.

A time when this modern Bouvila would have also seen the arrival of the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) in the capital; when he would surely have strolled through Plaza Catalunya during the 15-M movement or the large demonstrations before and after the process, and would have witnessed the first waves of tourists and the first problems finding housing. He would also have been part of an increasingly diverse Barcelona. Divided between those who no longer recognize the city as their own and believe it is losing its identity, and those who look to the future with optimism.