Barcelona Metropolis

The former thermal power plant in Sant Adrià de Besòs is on track to become a major hub for the audiovisual industry, a sector that, in Catalonia, comprises more than 4,100 companies, generating €8.6 billion in revenue and creating 42,000 jobs. After years of abandonment, the plant’s structure will be repurposed for education and research, while also hosting businesses. The aim is to breathe new life into the Besòs area and attract investment to a part of the city that has long been left in limbo.

Some people may have set foot in Sant Adrià de Besòs for the first time thanks to Manifesta, the contemporary art biennial that has breathed new life into the Tres Xemeneies – an iconic metropolitan landmark left abandoned since its turbines fell silent in 2011. Until just a few months ago, few would have imagined that this former Endesa (formerly Fecsa) power station would become a cultural pilgrimage site, with crowds pouring in to see world-class artistic interventions. The arrival of this European event made it clear that life extends beyond Barcelona’s city centre, into an area mistakenly labelled as the periphery, but one that ceased to be the city’s backyard long ago.

The spotlight the nomadic biennial has placed on the Tres Xemeneies comes just as its future reaches a decisive turning point. For years, the site has been the subject of a long and varied list of proposed uses, from a transport museum and an energy interpretation centre to a memorial space or even a museum dedicated to Chinese culture. After much back and forth, the so-called “Sagrada Família of the Poor” is now on the verge of its long-awaited second life. The definitive answer comes in the form of Catalunya Media City, a project launched by the Generalitat in early 2021 to transform the site and its surroundings into a hub for the audiovisual, digital and gaming industries – combining education and research with opportunities for businesses, both large and small.

The skeletal remains of the former power station will soon be revitalised by a thriving sector that spans film, music, radio and television production, alongside advertising, video games and immersive experiences. Leaving behind the pollution and black rain once produced by the old plant, the project led by the Generalitat Government of Catalonia aims to consolidate Sant Adrià as a hub for an industry that has so far been scattered, reinforcing its technological leadership. “One of Barcelona’s strengths is its ability to attract talent, multinational companies and start-ups, as we’ve seen in other sectors. The same approach is needed here”, says Miquel Rutllant, president of the Clúster Audiovisual de Catalunya [Audiovisual Cluster of Barcelona] and a key proponent of Catalunya Media City.

This new creative and technological epicentre will be housed in the turbine hall, the building adjacent to the Tres Xemeneies. A part of its working-class and neighbourhood heritage – once at risk of being lost – was preserved thanks to strong community mobilisation. These are the only surviving remnants of the industrial complex built in the 1970s, spared from Endesa’s demolition following the plant’s closure. The other buildings and their contents have been completely erased. “Everything that smelled of work” was destroyed, as Sant Adrià-born writer Javier Pérez Andújar puts it.

With this history in the background, Catalunya Media City will create a training and business park equipped with top-tier infrastructure to foster creation and experimentation. On one hand, there will be facilities such as sound stages, recording studios and rooms for mixing, colour grading and editing, as well as laboratories to test technologies like virtual and augmented reality, the metaverse and projection mapping. The third floor of the building, designed with a more open layout, will be transformed into a versatile space for all kinds of cultural events – ranging from concerts and exhibitions to fairs, conferences, film shoots and live broadcasts – accommodating up to 4,000 people.

The training and research hub will involve leading universities and vocational training centres, with space for over 2,000 students. Following this, there will be a dedicated area for businesses, featuring offices, meeting rooms and co-working spaces, tailored to companies of varying levels of maturity. Incubation and acceleration programmes for emerging tech companies will also be developed, along with artist residencies. With an estimated public-private investment of €450 million, the new complex is expected to be operational by 2028 or 2029. The Government of Spain will contribute €60 million to support the first phase of the project.

A new hub of activity to reconnect Sant Adrià

Outside the turbine hall, the city of Sant Adrià is set to leverage the transformation of the Tres Xemeneies to create an economic hub around it – an area that is one of the last undeveloped urban sites along the metropolitan coastline. “This is a great opportunity to regenerate land in an area where the former industries have shut down, as well as to reconnect and build the city”, says José Antonio Gras, Deputy Mayor for Urban Planning in Sant Adrià de Besòs. The area spans more than 30 hectares, located between the mouth of the Besòs River, the railway line, the sea and Tres Xemeneies, bordering the La Mora district of Badalona.

According to the Urban Planning Master Plan, approved in 2023, a large ten-hectare urban park will be developed, along with nearly 1,800 new homes, 40% of which will be affordable housing. However, this urban development has met resistance from groups such as the Plataforma per la Conservació de les Tres Xemeneies, which advocates for the Fecsa plant to be preserved solely for cultural purposes and criticises the construction of large residential developments in a flood-prone area. “A space like the Besòs river park has been very successful and it doesn’t have any homes or economic activity. We could do the same here, without building flats just to fill it. That’s just an excuse”, says Roger Hoyos, a member of the platform.

The residential neighbourhood will be accompanied by nearly 100,000 square metres of space dedicated to economic activity, most of which will be located behind the Tres Xemeneies. “We want to create a space where different companies and public entities can coexist and build an ecosystem”, explains Gras, with a particular focus on the Corporació Catalana de Mitjans Audiovisuals (CCMA, Catalan Corporation of Audiovisual Media). The local government, led by socialist Filo Cañete, anticipates that the area will generate around 10,000 jobs as companies set up in the vicinity of the former plant, which is strategically located near a submarine fibre optic cable station – an essential piece of infrastructure for the audiovisual industry.

The companies being targeted are part of a sector that generates more than €8.6 billion in revenue and provides almost 42,000 jobs, according to data from ACCIÓ, the Generalitat’s business competitiveness agency. The 4,160 audiovisual companies in Catalonia contribute 3% of the region’s GDP. In addition, there are around 330 start-ups, more than double the number from five years ago. This Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) event, held at Fira de Barcelona, Europe’s largest audiovisual congress, plays a key role in driving this growth. Like the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the event has become a magnet for foreign investment, with multinational companies such as B-Tech, Lang, Aztec and Lightware setting up headquarters in Barcelona. A core area of growth in the audiovisual sector is video games, where the Catalan capital has strengthened its position in recent years with the arrival of major players like Rovio, the creator of Angry Birds.

Unveiling the interior of Les Tres Xemeneies

Thirteen years after the closure of the power station in Sant Adrià de Besòs, the interior of its former turbine hall opened to visitors for the first time at the end of 2024. This unprecedented access was made possible by the European nomadic biennial Manifesta, which transformed the space with a series of artistic interventions. Here are some photographs from the event: