Construction of the future Clínic will begin in 2030 and the campus will have a metro station.

BarcelonaThe future of the new Clínic-Universitat de Barcelona Health Campus is taking shape. The institutions are maintaining the opening schedule for the new hospital, university, and research complex. at the top of the Diagonal looking ahead to 2035, and therefore, this Monday the Joint Monitoring Committee – which involves the Generalitat, Barcelona City Council, Hospital Clínic, the University of Barcelona (UB), as well as the City Councils of L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Esplugues de Llobregat and the Barcelona Provincial Council – announced that it plans to begin relocation work on 2035. Another new development announced is that the updated project to extend metro line L3 so that the Clínic and the Sant Joan de Déu Hospital share a station in the area has now been put out to tender.

At the beginning of last year, the committee unlocked the jobs to begin shaping the new campus, which will have approximately 300,000 square meters of built area—the equivalent of more than two blocks of the Eixample district—and will simultaneously house the new hospital, the UB Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, and several leading research centers. Furthermore, its location is strategic, as it will spearhead the Diagonal Health axis, along with the Sant Joan de Dios Campus, the UB Barcelona Science Park, and the University Zone.

In recent months, the committee has been specifying key aspects regarding management, uses, urban transformation, and infrastructure. On the one hand, the statutes of the Porta Diagonal-Campus Clínic Consortium, the instrument of governance and promotion of the project, have been approved, so the next step will be for the eight institutions involved to approve it to put it into operation in 2026. In addition, it has been agreed that the Generalitat will begin the process of preparing an urban master plan that will be drafted and processed between this year and 2027. Afterwards, the construction projects for the new campus would be carried out between 2027 and 2028 to subsequently face the tendering and execution of the works, which would begin in 2030.

Esplugues Centre, which will be put out to tender for an amount of 4.5 million euros in 12 months. The Barcelona Metropolitan Region's Infrastructure Master Plan (PDI) 2021-2030 already includes the extension of Line 3 from the University Zone to Sant Feliu de Llobregat, with a new 8.5-kilometer section with nine stations. Now, as a first phase, the plan foresees the extension to Esplugues Centre, which is 2.5 kilometers long, to build two stations.

"Given the institutional agreement for the future campus around Avinguda Diagonal, it has been deemed appropriate to update the project for the extension of Line 3 to facilitate public transport to this leading biomedical center," the Government reported in a statement. This service should also be completed by 2035. The route of this first phase starts at the current Zona Universitaria station on L3 – near the intersection with González Tablas Street – and ends in Esplugues de Llobregat – between Laureà Miró Street and Josep Puig y Cadafalch Street, before Josep Puig i Cadafalch Street. Specifically, in San Juan de Dios-Finestrelles, next to the San Juan de Dios Hospital and straddling Paseo de San Juan de Dios and Ahrensburg Avenue, and in Esplugues-Centre, in Plaza de Santa Magdalena, opposite the Town Hall.

International competition

This is one of Catalonia's strategic projects to position itself at the forefront of European healthcare and biomedical research, and the institutions' goal is for the first patients to arrive at the new Clínic by 2035. "It will be a long road to complete the entire campus, which will be the key element of the healthcare axis on Diagonal," says the responsible director. An essential step, according to the committee, will be the international architecture competition, which aims to attract proposals and ideas from architectural professionals from around the world to draft the project. The competition is expected to be held by the end of 2026, the year in which Barcelona will be the World Capital of Architecture, and the winners will design the future Clínic.

Participating firms will be able to base their ideas on the ideas of students from the Master's in Hospital Architecture promoted by the UB and the Hospital Clínic, who have created four reference models. The students have analyzed the possibilities for their location and have developed proposals that will be included in the competition rules, although they are not binding and candidates may or may not use them as a reference.

The general coordinator of the master's degree, Ramon Sanàbria, assures that, thanks to these models, the contestants will have references regarding the architectural possibilities of the future location of the campus, which they have worked on together with engineers, urban planners, and other specialists to provide as much information as possible to the candidates. "These models don't indicate the path, they indicate possibilities. The path chosen by each of the contestants, of course," clarifies Sanabria. Once a winner is selected, a two-year process will begin in which the project will have to be fine-tuned before construction begins.