Montjuic is known as the ‘magic mountain’ — how Barcelona must hope it lives up to that when they play there next season.
The club have confirmed they will play at the Estadi Olimpic Lluis Companys, located on the large hill of that name south west of the city centre, for at least 2023-24 while a €1.5billion (£1.3bn, $1.6bn) redevelopment of the Camp Nou takes place.
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It is thought it will cost Barcelona €15m-€20m to get the stadium ready for them to use, while they expect to lose up to €90million by not playing at ‘home’. That is not ideal for a club already mired in financial problems who have been told to raise €200m by La Liga president Javier Tebas if they want to spend any money during the upcoming summer transfer window.
This will not be the first time the Catalan giants have played at Montjuic.
They have played there six times as the home team — twice in official matches and four times in the Joan Gamper Trophy, the annual friendly that marks the beginning of their seasons. It was also the venue for a 17-year-old Lionel Messi’s La Liga debut in an October 2004 derby away to city neighbours Espanyol, who played their home games there for 12 seasons from 1997.
Read more: Inside the chaos and controversy of Barcelona’s Camp Nou rebuild
Many supporters will be dreaming about the Argentina superstar making a triumphant return on its pitch after several figures from inside and outside the club talked up the prospect of him rejoining Barcelona this summer following two years with Paris Saint-Germain.
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The stadium has also been the core venue for the 1992 Olympic Games and staged shows by musical artists including The Rolling Stones and AC/DC — Bruce Springsteen plays there at the end of this month. It was also, for a long time, the home of refugees displaced by the Spanish Civil War.
But how ready is it to host one of Europe’s top football teams? The Athletic took a trip to Montjuic to find out…
You can sense things have happened at the magic mountain as you walk its streets.
Located south of central Barcelona, the hill climbs 177 metres (almost 600ft) above sea level and has been described as one of the coldest places to watch football in Europe by veteran journalists.
To one side of the hill you can see the gates to the city in Placa D’Espanya; to the other is the port, where the margins of Barcelona merge with the Mediterranean Sea.
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In 1842, the castle on top of the hill was used to bombard the city during the reign of Queen Isabel II, when her government judged Barcelona’s residents to be rebelling. The population was caught in the middle of the crossfire from the two hills on the margins of the city, Montjuic to the south west and Tibidabo to the north west.
Montjuic became the centre of the world in 1992 when Barcelona hosted the summer Olympics. That area of the city was suddenly filled with statues reminiscent of Ancient Greece, stadiums for a range of sports and swimming pools with sweeping views of the Catalan capital.
The Lluis Companys stadium itself was inaugurated almost 30 years before Barcelona started playing at Camp Nou. It was opened in 1929 as part of the Barcelona International Exposition. When Spain’s second city was initially chosen to host the Olympics in 1986, the stadium was redesigned and inaugurated again in 1989.
The opening and the closing ceremonies were held there — a memorable rendition of the 1992 Games’ anthem ‘Barcelona’ was sung by locally-born opera singer Montserrat Caballe — and the track and field events.
In 2001, it was renamed to honour Lluis Companys — the former president of Catalonia who was executed by General Francisco Franco’s forces at nearby Montjuic Castle in 1940 after being handed over by the Nazi authorities in France.
Unlike Camp Nou, the stadium is not in the heart of the city. It is a good 20-minute walk from the Placa d’Espanya square at the base of Montjuic.
You go through Barcelona’s Venetian Towers and head towards the Magic Fountain of Montjuic, one of the city’s main tourist attractions. Then you can take an escalator up to the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya — the biggest art museum in the city — and follow the stairs to the stadium, or walk along the hill past the Poble Espanyol architectural museum.
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The last remnants of those Olympics 31 years ago are now mostly used for concerts and by those looking to escape the heavily polluted city centre. You are most likely to encounter joggers, cyclists and organised exercise groups if you walk down the Avinguda de l’Estadi, the road on which the stadium is located, as the sun is about to set.
Then you arrive at the stadium, which is bathed in golden light as the shadows lengthen — a taste of what Barcelona fans can expect next season before their evening kick-offs.
This is far from a modern stadium. Today, it looks more like a historical relic than a suitable home for one of the world’s most famous football teams. Through the large arches at the main entrance to the ground, you can see part of the stands and the scoreboard. Those seats are a neutral grey, a sign that no team have settled here for long.
A few curious Barcelona fans wander up to see what their temporary home will look like — and appear unconvinced. After all, this is a place still closely linked to neighbours and rivals Espanyol.
It is a large ground, with a capacity of just over 60,000 and an athletics track still surrounds the pitch. Even that many seats will however provide logistical problems for a side who have attracted an average attendance of around 83,500 people this season as Xavi’s team chase their first La Liga title in four years.
It will also not generate the same atmosphere as the iconic design of Camp Nou, particularly with that running track between the fans and the action.
You can feel the cold those reporters referred to, which comes in from the nearby port and the sea beyond, and then there is the soupy smell produced by chemical plants and decomposing rubbish which characterises the Zona Franca neighbourhood down the road.
You wonder how the stadium’s former residents, and we use that word deliberately, coped with that cold. Refugees from the losing side of the Spanish Civil War lived here in the 1960s, when the barracks on Somorrostro beach to the east of Montjuic suffered flooding and had to relocate the tenants. One video from 1964 shows families hanging out their laundry in the bowels of the stadium.
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After the Civil War ended in 1939, Barcelona experienced a surge in immigration from the south of Spain. Those people came looking for work but found little in the way of housing. The Catalan bourgeoisie sold plots of land they owned on Montjuic so the new arrivals could build huts to live in — and they soon covered the hill.
The hill became a village, and that village turned into a community of 30,000 residents spread among 6,000 huts on Montjuic, which they called Can Valero. There were other huts spread out between the city’s El Carmel district and Somorrostro beach.
According to Rafael Usero, who was born in one of those shanty towns in 1949, people living in the stadium was “a temporary solution” — but lived there for 17 years. They did not have electricity or running water in their shacks.
“The cubicles in which each family lived inside the stadium were separated by blankets, in order to create intimacy,” Usero says.
“The water we would fetch, and the light we would get from the stadium. Someone tapped the stadium’s power cable and we hooked up all the huts around us. The whole mountain had light thanks to that — it was a service the stadium gave us.
“There was nothing legal about it, it was the result of people’s ingenuity. There were so many of us taking advantage of that that when it was dark and some people took the opportunity to watch TV, the intensity of the light was lowered.”
Food was scarce, but Usero says the residents “didn’t go hungry”. His mother used to tell him to eat bread to fill his stomach because there was no other food, while he tells a story of how they had a party the day someone brought fuet — a type of Catalan dry-cured sausage — to the hill.
The size of each hut depended on the family. Some were proper houses with rooms; others consisted of just 20 square metres for a whole family, with blankets as walls. Usero’s backed onto the stadium. “It was always there,” he says.
Some say the shanty towns were reminiscent of the Brazilian favelas, although residents do not like that comparison.
“Montjuic was never a slum, it was a place where we lived, working people,” Usero says, “75 per cent of the men worked in industry or construction, about seven per cent went to clean houses and there were many more who worked at home, painting figurines or sewing.
“If you told a cab driver in those days that you were going to Montjuic, he didn’t want to go in. He was afraid. And if he was afraid, it was because he didn’t know us.”
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At the end of the 1970s, the city council relocated those families to apartments in nearby cities. They have lived there for 50 years and far from remembering their time in the shanty towns of Montjuic as miserable, they recall the sense of freedom they enjoyed.
“After that, the stadium had a period of lethargy,” Usero says. “There was a time when the stadium was forgotten. An athlete would come to run from time to time, but there were no big sporting events.”
That will change with the arrival of Barcelona next season.
What is clear is that Montjuic is a place with a complex history: some of it boasted about by its city, other parts of it forgotten.
Barcelona will hope it helps them on their way to a brighter future.
(Photos for top image: The Athletic/Laia Cervello Herrero; designed by Sam Richardson)