Montjuïc is inseparable from the very existence of Barcelona. More than two thousand years ago, the presence of this rocky outcrop beside the coastline made it a decisive maritime landmark, leading the Romans to choose this site on which to found the city: the mountain served as a reference point for sailors and as a lookout over the territory. Today, that same hill is a privileged vantage point over metropolitan Barcelona and concentrates, within a relatively short route, an exceptional density of cultural facilities created at very different moments in time but united by a single aim: to turn Montjuïc into a great public space devoted to culture and nature.
The route proposes a walk along the slope facing Plaça d’Espanya and the Eixample, following the thread of its museum architecture. At the foot of the hill, the Casaramona Factory, now CaixaForum, and the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion confront two complementary ways of understanding modernity: the industrial legacy of brickwork and fragmented volumes, and the abstraction of the free plan, water and noble materials. Higher up, the fire station, the Palau Nacional — home to the National Museum of Art of Catalonia (MNAC) — and the former Palace of Graphic Arts — now housing the Museum of Archaeology of Catalonia — recall how the grand settings of the 1929 International Exhibition have been transformed into permanent museums.
During the second half of the 20th century, the Ethnological and World Cultures Museum, conceived from the outset as a museum adapted to the slope and its gardens, and the Joan Miró Foundation, with Sert’s architecture integrated into the landscape, consolidated Montjuïc as the mountain of museums. Coinciding with the centenary of the 1929 Exhibition, the National Museum is currently working on the New National Museum project, which foresees extending the museum into the pavilions of the exhibition grounds, further reinforcing this condition of a cultural hill. The result is an itinerary that makes it possible to read Barcelona’s recent history through the way it has built, transformed and reinvented its museums on this very rocky hill that made the birth of the city possible.
