La Rambla is considered to be the most well-known street in central Barcelona, the Catalan capital of Spain.
A tree-lined pedestrian street, it stretched for three-quarters of a mile, forming the boundary between the Gothic neighbourhood to the east and El Raval to the west.
However, in 2024 La Rambla becomes very crowded, especially during the height of the tourist season.
Today, the city’s residents tend to see it only as an obligatory boundary, with only tourists making use of its original function.
“Locals walk along it transversally, and tourists longitudinally,” summarises the architect Lola Domènec, a member of the cross-disciplinary Km-ZERO team that won the competition for the transformation of La Rambla in 2017 to El Pais.
The redevelopment project has been a long time in the making, starting two decades ago. In 2007, another architect, Itziar González, was a city councillor for the Ciutat Vella district at the time when she declared that the city should do something about the street that was already taken over by tourism. The project was dropped when she resigned three years later.
The project was restarted under the Barcelona en Comú government, with Ada Colau as mayor, who in 2017 announced an international competition for the redevelopment. It was González and her small team that was awarded the project. The project was again ready for construction to begin in 2020, but the reform was halted until the end of Colau’s second term.
The first phase, which involves the area around the Columbus monument, next to the port, is already finished. The entire project is expected to be completed in February 2027.
By this date, the sidewalks will have been widened, from 3.5 to five metres, as well as the central promenade, at the cost of reducing the number of lanes for motor vehicles from four to two, despite initial ideas to remove it completely.
“I think that La Rambla has to be a space where priority is given to pedestrians, but vehicles must have access to it because it is a complex area with facilities, many bars, restaurants, hotels and shops, as well as housing,” says Domènec. “What we have proposed is that it should be basically pedestrian, but with restricted access for buses and internal users.”
More space will be given to 375 trees, most of them plane trees, as well as lighting and street furniture improvements, two-coloured paving and cultural facilities such as an immersive arts centre.
One of the main goals is to rescue the promenade from excess tourism and return it to the citizens.
“Tourism is a serious problem that has killed one of the most emblematic streets in the world. It was always full of people, but it used to be very diverse, not the current tourist monoculture,” said Fernando Casal, a member of the SOS Las Ramblas association, formed by residents.
Jordi Valles, a city councillor and local chief of the Economy, Finance and Tourism department, added: “We want to attract the right type of tourists, and not the other one. It is not about tourists with or without money but about people with good or bad behaviour. And, as demand is unstoppable, we only have tools to control supply.”
There are, however, some setbacks. Currently, the majority of the shops on La Rambla are poor-quality restaurants and souvenir shops, which according to Lola Domènec, are “destroying the image of this street and of the whole city”.
It would be good to reverse this with more local shops. This would even interest tourists because it is not about driving them out. Tourists also want an authentic city, not a theme park. In the same way that there is social housing, there should be protected premises, with neighbourhood shops and local products.”