This striking, futuristic piece of engineering elegantly spans the busy Ronda Litoral ring road in Barcelona’s Fòrum district. But the unique, three-armed pedestrian footbridge, connecting the convention centre to the seafront, holds a secret history: it is a transplant, a survivor of one of the city’s most radical urban transformations. It was moved piece by piece from its original home in Plaça de les Glòries.
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The bridge’s story is one of migration, a physical embodiment of Barcelona’s restless ambition to reshape itself, which saw an acclaimed piece of 1970s infrastructure saved from demolition and given a new life ahead of the 1992 Olympic Games.
Cerdà’s Dream, A Concrete Reality
To understand the bridge’s journey, we must look back to the original vision for Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes. Visionary urban planner Ildefons Cerdà conceived the plaza in the mid-19th century. He intended it to be the grand central hub of modern Barcelona, where its three main avenues – Gran Via, Diagonal, and Meridiana – would meet.
However, as La Vanguardia reported, reality took a different turn. By the 1970s, Cerdà’s dream had morphed into a hostile knot of elevated motorways – a concrete “scalextric” that prioritised cars over people. This intersection, the Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes and Avinguda Meridiana, became an inhospitable “non-place,” severing pedestrian connections between three distinct neighbourhoods.
An Award-Winning Solution
To solve this disconnection, a bold engineering solution was proposed. The result was an intricate, cable-stayed footbridge designed by engineer Leonardo Fernández Troyano. Unveiled in 1974, it was a marvel of its time: the first of its kind in Catalonia and only the second in Spain, following Bilbao’s iconic Puente de la Salve.
Its design was as unique as it was complex. A single pylon supports a web of steel cables holding up three arms: one straight deck that bifurcates into two elegantly curved ramps. The ends of the straight arm and one of the curved arms spiral down in a distinctive snail shape. Its innovative structure earned a prestigious award in 1975 from the European Convention for Constructional Steelwork. For nearly two decades, it served its purpose, a slender thread of humanity woven through a tangle of concrete.
The Olympic Upheaval and a New Home
Barcelona’s transformation ahead of the 1992 Summer Olympics brought seismic changes to Glòries. Authorities redesigned the elevated ring road into a large, ground-level roundabout or “drum” to manage traffic, with a car park at its centre. While this organised vehicle flow, it did little to make the area more welcoming. The footbridge, a symbol of the old, dysfunctional layout, became obsolete.
Instead of scrapping the award-winning structure, the city made an unusual decision: they would move it. They chose the then-desolate coastal area, now known as the Parc del Fòrum, as its new destination – a site even more inhospitable at the time than Glòries itself. Its new role was to span the newly constructed Ronda Litoral ring road, connecting a future park with the promenade and reclaimed beaches.
In a fitting turn, the same engineering firm that built the bridge two decades earlier oversaw its relocation. The team carefully dismantled the structure, salvaging what they could of the original and reconstructing the rest in its new home.
A Bridge to the Future, Carrying its Past
Today, the footbridge begins at the rear of the Centre de Convencions Internacional de Barcelona (CCIB), a landmark from the later urban renewal driven by the 2004 Universal Forum of Cultures. It has found a new purpose, yet it retains a curious feature from its past. Despite now connecting only two points – the convention area and the seafront – it still has all three of its original arms. One of its curved ramps now leads nowhere in particular; a silent testament to its former life connecting three divided sectors at Glòries.
The bridge stands as a piece of preserved history, an engineering prodigy that was once largely unappreciated in its hostile Glòries environment. Its journey from a chaotic traffic interchange to a modern cultural park mirrors the relentless evolution of Barcelona itself. While the bridge found a new home, its former site continues its long, complex transformation, with the city council recently delivering new public housing as part of the ongoing redevelopment of the area.
The migrant bridge of Glòries is more than just a path over a motorway; it is a physical link between two distinct eras of Barcelona’s ambitious urban story.
