It’s one of the defining images of the Barcelona Olympics: a perfectly coordinated diver, suspended mid-air, the red swimsuit a swooning contrast against the deep blue Barcelona skyline in the background. The only sign that the diver isn’t plummeting into the bowels of the city like a comet from space is a diving board peeking out of the left side of the image.
In many ways this photo typified the new Barcelona: brave, bold, and – at times – utterly breathtaking. As Pere Miró, a former IOC director, told Olympics.com in 2022: “It was very clear that there was a Barcelona before the Games and a Barcelona after the Games.”
For once, a sports executive wasn’t exaggerating or mythologising. Before the Olympics, Barcelona had been known as the city that lived de espaldas al mar (with its back to the sea). The gleaming ocean boulevards and golden beaches you see today literally didn’t exist before 1992: thousands of tonnes of sand were imported from Egypt to fill out the city’s coastline, which still needs regularly topping up to this day.
—
—
The Barcelona that existed before the Games wasn’t just short of a beach or two. In a documentary about the famed Barcelona club night Nitsa, techno producer Jeff Mills recalls DJing in the city before the Olympics. “It was a bit weird that this new [electronic] music scene hadn’t got here yet,” he remembers. “In Spain it took a while to get established. At that time there weren’t many places to go – it was all gathered in a few cities.”
The Olympic money brought about changes to the city that had been a long time coming, with much of the regeneration planned years before the bid. Barcelona added not just beaches and boulevards but also brand new sports facilities, high-end accommodation and a rebuilt transport infrastructure.
But after decades of planning and transformation, once the Olympics roadshow finally rolled out of town it was a case of the day after the Lord Mayor’s show. “I think we had a post-Olympics hangover,” recalls Gabi Ruiz in the documentary, who was the co-founder of Nitsa and the current director of Primavera Sound. “We had come so far…so what do we do next? The city didn’t know where it was heading. It had lost its voice.”
The cultural industries had been largely forgotten about in the tidal wave of Olympic investment; festivals and venues eschewed in favour of sports arenas and stadiums. The post-Olympic years presented an opportunity to shift focus.
“The interests of Barcelona City Council started to move towards other fields that had been left out of the Olympic revolution,” says Lluís S. Ceprián, a Barcelona-based music journalist. “In 1993 they decided to hold a festival, with public money, in which the entire music industry of Catalonia and the rest of Spain would participate. BAM (Barcelona Acció Musical) was born. This festival was the seed of everything that came after.”
—
—
BAM, which takes place during the city’s La Mercè celebrations, was the ‘driving force behind the new alternative rock scene,’ according to Ceprián. Yet it was also indicative of Barcelona’s new direction of travel. Public money may have spearheaded BAM, but down in the depths of the city, where that lonesome red diver looked to be plummeting straight towards, there was an unmistakable change in atmosphere.
Within two years of the closing ceremony, Barcelona saw a flurry of post-Olympic musical activity. There was the first edition of BAM. The music magazine Mondo Sonoro was launched. The Nitsa clubnight opened its doors for the first time. The promoters behind Primavera Sound held their first events in the city. And, perhaps most importantly, the first ever Sonar Festival took place.
“Sonar was the driving force behind a new, flourishing electronic scene in the city,” says Ceprián. “Suddenly clubs began to appear across the city in different neighbourhoods. Nitsa was the first to appear, first on Beethoven Street (near Diagonal) and then in the centre near Paral·lel (current location). There was also La Terrazza, in Poble Espanyol, the Otto Zutz and KGB in Gràcia, and A Saco! (later Razzmatazz) in Poble Espanyol.”
Nitsa was another vital cog in the shift towards the electronic sounds that were engulfing Europe at that time. “The first Spanish city [to embrace it] was here, in Barcelona,” says Mills. “In Madrid there was absolutely nothing.”
It typified the sea change in Barcelona’s new Mediterranean-facing outlook. “Barcelona was trying to portray an image of being Mediterranean, open to the sea, free…I think that attitude had a lot to do with Nitsa’s success,” recalls Ruiz.
Of course, a change in attitude is all well and good, but an emerging scene still needs physical spaces to flourish. Yet it wasn’t the gleaming new Olympic buildings that provided them: it was the places that had been left behind in the goldrush.
—
—
By the time the Olympics came around, Barcelona’s Poblenou neighbourhood had long been a derided and forgotten part of the city. In the 80s and 90s it was a magnet for graffiti artists, attracted by the raft of now-empty factories that gave the area its ‘Catalan Manchester’ moniker. Poblenou’s isolated status was summed up by two train tracks that enveloped the neighbourhood, cutting it off from the rest of the city and making it largely inaccessible.
Olympic investment may have removed the isolating train lines, but only so that construction work on the fringes of Poblenou could keep moving along. Whilst it benefited from Olympic money, after the Games the area remained full of vacant factories and long-forgotten workshops, many earmarked for demolition or simply forgotten about in the rush of regeneration. The new Barcelona this was not.
But those discarded factories and workshops would provide the foundations for the city’s creative scene to develop. In the years after the Games, artists and musicians gradually moved into the cavernous spaces dotted throughout Poblenou, attracted by low (or no) rents, wide open areas and isolation from the rest of the city that meant noise complaints weren’t an issue.
The creative compound Palo Alto opened in 1989, providing a safe and affordable space for Poblenou artists and creatives to work. It was one of those buildings earmarked for demolition before the Olympics, but was saved by its new creative community. The live venue Sala BeGood opened in 1992, before Sonar moved into the district in 1997. Then, in 2000, the nightclub Sala Zeleste closed and reopened as Razzmatazz.
An imposing five-storey club located in an old Poblenou carpet factory, Razzmatazz rapidly established itself as one of the leading clubs on the continent. It straddled the divide between Sala Zeleste’s rock heritage and the city’s now-booming electronic scene, attracting renowned indie artists and pioneering DJs alike – often on the same bill.
“Razzmatazz began as an alternative rock club and little by little began to introduce electronic influences until it became what it is today: one of the most important dance music spaces in Europe,” Ceprián explains.
Anointed club of the year by Mixmag in 2015, it remains the beating heart of Barcelona’s electronic soul.
—
—
Just a few years earlier, electronic music had registered barely more than a bleep in Barcelona. By the turn of the millennium, the city was at the centre of the European scene. Sonar remains one of the most pioneering and forward-thinking festivals on the continent, while Nitsa and Razzmatazz are international points of reference for partygoers and DJs alike.
Meanwhile, the transformation of Poblenou has only accelerated since those early post-Olympic days. Studios, workshops, startups and co-working spaces now dominate the area, with the high-rise 22@ development providing the city’s answer to Silicon Valley (with high-rise rents to match).
In many ways, the tourist boom precipitated by the 1992 Olympics has now come full circle. Faced with mass tourism, surging rents and growing protests, Barcelona City Council recently unveiled plans to ban Airbnb-style lets in the city and increase tourist taxes for passenger ships.
Yet in the city’s clubs and venues, the beat goes on. It may have been sidelined here for many years, but music always finds a way.
—
Words: Nick Harland
