Walk it with the app
Pick a quest, follow the compass, check in at each stop. No account needed to start, no ads, no subscription.
Nou Barris is the Barcelona most visitors never see: a district built fast in the 1950s–70s on the slopes of Collserola, where neighbours fought for every park and school. But it is older than its tower blocks — farmhouses, a village church, a 19th-century psychiatric hospital that now houses the district council, and at the city’s edge the unfinished castle of Torre Baró, with a view across all of Barcelona.
From the quest: The Edge of the City
A castle that was never a castle — an unfinished folly on the hill.
Up on a spur of the Collserola hills stands what looks like a small medieval castle, all arches and battlements. It isn't: it was begun in 1905 as the centrepiece — a hotel — of a grand garden-city development that was never built. The scheme collapsed, the building was left unfinished and abandoned, and only this mock-castle survived. Restored in 1989 and now a Collserola park information point, it has become one of the emblems of Nou Barris.
From the quest: How Nou Barris Became Nou Barris
The vast, visionary asylum whose grounds became the heart of Nou Barris.
These sober neoclassical pavilions are all that remains of a colossal psychiatric hospital, once one of the most advanced in Western Europe. Conceived by Dr Emili Pi i Molist and designed by architect Josep Oriol i Bernadet from 1859, built between 1885 and 1915, it spread across some fifty hectares — twelve symmetrical pavilions, sixteen garden courtyards, room for seven hundred patients — deliberately set out here in open country, away from the city, as a place of light, air and calm. The last patients left in 1987.
From the quest: The Edge of the City
The last open stretch of a thousand-year-old canal, still watering gardens.
Down in Vallbona — a tiny farming village marooned at the very northern edge of Barcelona, cut off from the rest of the city by motorways — runs the only open-air stretch left of the Rec Comtal. This 'county canal' was dug in the Middle Ages, its origins traced to the 10th century, and for around a thousand years it was the great channel that brought drinking water into Barcelona. Everywhere else it has been buried under the modern city; here alone it still flows in the open, past the square and on to the fields.
A small sample. In the app, each stop unlocks when you reach it — with a detail most visitors miss.
Culture & History
Views & Photo Spots
Hidden & Local
Pick a quest, follow the compass, check in at each stop. No account needed to start, no ads, no subscription.
