La Rambla is arguably Barcelona’s most famous street. It’s a tree-lined street that runs 1.2 kilometres from the Plaça de Catalunya in the north to Port Vell in the south. Its origin dates back to the 15th century when the original stream was drained and the semblance of a street started to emerge.
In the centuries that followed, the street came to serve as an important anchor for urban life in Barcelona. It provided a spine of open space within a dense medieval fabric of narrow streets. But alongside the rise of Barcelona as a global tourist destination, the street came to be seen more as a place for tourists than as a place for local urban life.
This desire to create more “sustainable tourism” is one of the impetuses behind the ~€56 million revitalization project that is currently underway and is expected to be completed in 2027.
But this raises a fascinating city-building question: How do you actually make a street less, you know, touristy? Tourists like visiting Barcelona and walking on this street, and so aren’t business owners going to just naturally cater to them? And aren’t landlords just going to rent to whoever will pay the highest rents?
Here’s some of what Barcelona is doing:
- Transversal flows: This one is fascinating to me. It was found that tourists tend to walk the street longitudinally (up and down), whereas locals tend to walk it transversally. In other words, locals are more likely to cross it coming from one of the surrounding neighbourhoods. The new design now privileges these more local flows.
- Expanded pedestrian zones: Car traffic is being reduced to one 3.5-metre lane in each direction. This frees up more space for pedestrians, which is expected to help with overcrowding.
- Room for culture: Dedicated spaces are being created to allow for more cultural programming. This is also part of a broader strategy to elevate the kind of tourism that the city receives.
- Commercial licensing restrictions: As I understand it, the city is actively working to limit the licenses given out to souvenir shops (and the like) along the street. A meaningful amount of retail is also housed in kiosks and stands within the public right-of-way, where the city has even greater control.
- Mercat de la Boqueria: One of the main anchors on La Rambla is the publicly owned market. But over the years, the product mix started to skew toward ready-to-eat foods and other to-go products designed for tourists. New restrictions have been put in place, or will be, that cap tourist-oriented offerings at 50%, allowing more space for local shopping needs. Interestingly enough, I have read that the merchants were in favour of this cap because the emphasis on tourist products was driving down margins. You instead want people coming in and grocery shopping for their families.
These are just some of the initiatives that are being undertaken to rebalance La Rambla and find a more sustainable equilibrium between tourists and locals. It also dovetails with some of the other broader moves that Barcelona has implemented, such as its short-term rental ban and the right of first refusal (ROFR) that it enjoys over certain buildings and homes in order to grow the city’s public housing stock.
It’ll be interesting to evaluate the effectiveness of these moves once the street is complete. La Rambla has many centuries of history and it has always evolved alongside Barcelona. Today is no different.
Images from Barcelona City Council
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