The Parc de les Glòries is opening on 26 April
Next Saturday 26 April is when the festivities celebrating the opening of the park will be taking place. After years of ongoing works, a moment long-awaited by locals is just around the corner. To celebrate the opening of the park, the space is busy getting ready for a fun and festive day with music shows, workshops and activities for all the family from 10.30 am to 6 pm.
The new part of the park covers 4.3 hectares, including over 9,000 square metres of green space, a broad promenade and new spaces for community activities. This means that with the opening of the central part of the Parc de les Glòries, Barcelona will have gained 9 hectares for community use, 30,000 square metres of green space and more than 1,000 trees.
The programme of events for the inauguration will be spread across different areas of the park, and will include two stages. One will be the main stage under the new Umbracle, where there’ll be a hot chocolate fest and live music from artists such as the group Ambauka who’ll be kicking off the celebrations, and Todos los Gatos son Pardos will be paying tribute to Gato Pérez with a workshop, swing dancing and a magic show to round things off. And there’ll also be a new ‘Agora Berta Cáceres’ stage, which will be hosting smaller-scale activities like storytelling and puppet shows.
Between 10 am and 2 pm there’ll be a play area in La Clariana, which has recently introduced giant wooden games and games for children with autism, and the Farinera organisation will be organising an “escape street” in this space too.
What’s more, an exhibition showing photographs of how Glòries has been transformed over the years will be on display at two locations in the park, Passeig Diagonal and Rambla Encants.
These activities will be offered in addition to those that the Park already runs on a regular basis: two big children’s play areas with some unusual features, an immersion garden, a reflecting pool and a whole host of biodiversity hubs that simulate Mediterranean forests and act as havens of biodiversity.
Many of the facilities, services and shops in the area around the park will also be taking part in the festivities: Disseny Hub Barcelona will be holding an open day all day long, La Farinera and El Tram will be organising activities, and the Encants Market, the Mirador de Glòries and various organisations from the Eixample and Sant Martí districts will also be getting involved.
A new park to be discovered
In this green lung within the city you’ll find new spaces such as the Umbracle, which provides 700 square metres of shade space for organising a wide range of activities, the Agora Sensorial Berta Cáceres, which offers a 2,500 square metres space surrounded by a ring of giant bamboos, one that can be used in a host of different ways, an immersion garden, planted with species that can adapt in line with climate change, a huge children’s play area covering almost 2,000 square metres, with 35 different kinds of play structures, a sandpit and rest areas, a water park that will be open during the summer months, a new recreational 1,200-square-metre recreation area for dogs and new biodiversity hubs, flowerbeds and rain gardens.
In short, a new park waiting to be discovered A space in the city that will be revealed in all its glory from 26 April onwards.