Over a million people at La Mercè 2023
The activities for the city’s annual festival reached new spaces, such as the Parc de l’Estació del Nord, which became the epicentre for the MAC programme; the Oasi MAC in C/ Consell de Cent, where artists were out and about to offer pedestrians their creations in the street, and C/ Menéndez y Pelayo, which became a new stage for concerts at night. The celebrations also regained the “Visca Picasso” series of festive figures to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s death, and featured displays using drones too. Ukrainian culture also played an important part in the programme, with Kyiv as the guest city.The citywide programme for Barcelona’s annual festival had brought together over a million people as of midday yesterday, with the data still to come for the music and fireworks spectacular, this year marking the 30th anniversary of the Sónar festival.
- Concerts: some 365,000 people attended the concerts for the city’s local festival, with stages located in different parts of the city.
- Street arts: estimates put the total number of people attending shows in this section at nearly 110,000 spectators. The epicentre for this programme was the Parc de l’Estació del Nord.
- Drone show: 80,000 people gathered on Sunday night between the Barceloneta and Somorrostro beaches to see the light and colour display in the city’s night sky.
- Fire run: held for the first time in Passeig de Gràcia, the children’s and adults’ version of the fire run attracted nearly 75,000 spectators between them, in an event involving some fifty devils’ and fire groups from all over the city.
- La Mercè on the website and social media: the website lamerce.barcelona recorded over a million visits during the festivities, with over three million pages visited. The Mercà app had 26,000 users and recorded 104,000 sessions. As for social media, the special videos devoted to La Mercè notched up more than 200,000 views.
