The new Maritime Front of Barcelona is already taking shape

BarcelonaBarcelona 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.

What is seen is only a brushstroke of what will be. But today the vegetation is already beginning to take over a space that until a year and a half ago was a large empty concrete lot – previously used as an improvised parking lot – and where the future Promenade can now be intuited. An avenue that will allow connecting the neighborhoods of Diagonal Mar, the Front Marítim del Poblenou and the Besòs i el Maresme, and that will complete the urbanization of the first line of the coast from La Barceloneta to the Forum.

A look at Google Maps allows for easily grasping the differences between before and now. Between that liminal concrete space, and a new Seafront where, in addition to new trees and vegetation, space has also been made for new street furniture – with wooden benches, railings, and shade structures – and the first beach volleyball courts. There is also a tiered seating area, which at one end connects the promenade with the beach and has as a major attraction a huge reclining bench that allows one to survey the entire Barcelona coastline.

The City Council's forecast is that the first phase of this new promenade – the one that passes over the Nova Mar Bella and Llevant beaches – could open in mid-December, a little later than initial calculations because the heat forced the planting of the trees to be delayed by a month. "It is the first piece of the last step of the transformation of the city's coastline," assures the chief architect of the Catalan capital, Maria Buhigas, who defends the renovation as "a fortunate combination" of three milestones: adaptation to climate change, gaining public space for citizen enjoyment, and strengthening the Seafront as an outdoor sports area, the so-called "blue pavilion".

A storm-proof facade

Regarding adaptation to climate change, the stretch of promenade that will be inaugurated this year will help make the area more permeable, replacing concrete with soil and vegetation, and consequently mitigating the heat. The major adaptation, however, will come in the next phase, already in the next term, when the part of the promenade closest to the coast will be moved twenty meters back. The line of the wall, currently convex with respect to the coast, will be concave, and will provide more space for the sand to cushion the waves. This will allow the city to gain almost a hectare of beach and preserve the new promenade against maritime storms.

This has been one of the changes that the current government of Jaume Collboni has introduced to the original project that was promoted during the terms of Ada Colau. A tweak prompted by the strong maritime storms in the autumn of 2023, which collapsed part of the protective wall of the Nova Mar Bella beach and forced the City Council to reconstruct it urgently. A context that also forced a rethink of the idea of a natural grandstand that would go down to the sand along the entire maritime facade and which will now be limited only to the two ends of the new promenade.

The future of the marine platform

Moving the wall back a few meters, however, has caused some headaches for the city council, as it has forced it to find a new location for the Agapito Fernández soccer field and to resolve the shuffle of pieces that this causes on the city's coastline. To resolve this, the City Council decided that it would move the field a few meters further north and build it anew –with stands and changing rooms in better conditions than the current ones– on top of the Forum marine platform.

The construction of the new field, in fact, will be one of the first steps to be carried out once the first phase of the Promenade has been completed. "Nobody will move them from the current field until they have the new one finished," highlights Buhigas, who emphasizes that the municipal government will fulfill the commitment it made to the sports clubs that use this facility.

The new football field will be one of the elements that will define the new Forum marine platform, which will act as the 12.7-hectare hub connecting the Maritime Promenade, Rambla Prim, and the Besòs-Badalona corridor. The City Council's goal is for the platform to balance its use for major events such as the Primavera Sound with being a large, open space "for public use."

To achieve this, walking and rest areas will be created. There will also be more vegetation and viewpoints. The edges of the platform will be modulated with slopes and gradients adapted to existing infrastructure, which will facilitate sea views from the seaside promenade, from Rambla Prim, and from the sides of the Ronda Litoral.