Olympic Games -Essay-

The Olympic Games:

An opportunity to create a better and renewed Barcelona.

The Olympic Games were an amazing opportunity to renew the city of Barcelona and to give it a new infrastructure such as a new highways and public transportation facilities, improving the quality of the city and recovering the beach front for the city use. This punctual intervention was used like a dynamic element to re-activate the city and was implanted in the perfect time to improve the architectural buildings, re-use of industrial buildings and other isolated projects that changed the city image.

The creation of housing accommodation for sportsman and sportsmen is one of the large benefits this project.  Renewals to the Real Palace, that changed to be a touristic point inside the city as a mediaeval museum, the creation of a communication tower, recovery of the beach front with the criticized “maremagnum” and the inclusion of roads for bicycles and pedestrians are among the changes that Barcelona faced during those years.

The main objective of this project was to create a zone entirely dedicated to sports with soccer, baseball and aquatic stadiums synchronized with the importance of an Olympic event, but it affected much more than that: nowadays the city uses these buildings for daily activities like the marina, the soccer stadium and all the museum created to impulse the city as a tourist attraction.

As we can see, the Olympic games were an opportunity that both, planners and politicians did not let pass by, and used it to renew Barcelona, giving it a global scale with a lot of tourist potential, but also with a cultural and historical identity and high quality infrastructure, architectural buildings and well-planned urban spaces.