How have audience figures evolved in Barcelona’s theatres? How are these venues distributed across the city? How many projects have been born in the last few years in the creative theatres? You’ll find the answer to these and many, many more questions on the website of the Barcelona Cultural Data Observatory, a space that not only provides figures, but (and this is the great challenge!) tries to show them to us in an understandable way.

The Observatori, an initiative of the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona, which is celebrating its tneth anniversary this year, prepares and disseminates data, indicators and reports that help us to understand the cultural reality of the city. It places the information at the disposal of all the public (be they institutions, cultural agents, researchers or people interested in knowing how cultural life in the city evolves) with special care to contextualise the data, using graphs and maps that provide additional information so that the data can be placed in their temporal and geographical context.

In recent years, the range of data on offer has grown and the way in which they have been presented has been refined and improved as the time passed. Thus, in the wake of the pandemic and the need to quickly detect the first signs of a recovery in activity, the Observatory has paid special attention to recent data, which portray the moment we are living in. From 2021 onwards, first the figures for museum audiences and then those relating to the activities of civic centres and libraries have become monthly.

Go to the Observatori’s website and you will find a direct link to the Museums’ Public Survey, a new tool that brings together and shows ten years of data on the public of Barcelona’s museums and some of the city’s other art centres. You can see how the data has evolved over the years and you can do your own research by simply adding the variables (age, sex, companions…).

A clearly visible entry will take you directly to the latest news: the analysis of Barcelona’s festivals in 2023, the annual collection of data on gender and culture or the first results of the project on interactions between cultural facilities and educational centres. You will also find two direct accesses to the map of cultural facilities in the city and a collection of annual data shared with other cities around the world (Barcelona in data).

If you want to know how Barcelona’s cultural life has evolved over the last ten years or what is the current state of the art of the major facilities, visit the website of the Observatori de Dades Culturals de Barcelona.