Last updated May 2019*

When I think about the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, two songs come to mind.

One is the famous Barcelona, performed by Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballe. It was used in the BBC opening sequence for the games.

The other – which is less well known outside Spain – is Amigos Para Siempre (Friends Forever) by Los Manolos.

If there’s one song which perfectly embodies the vibe of the games and the feelings of the locals who were proud to welcome new friends and visitors to their city, it’s Friends Forever.

The question though is whether, 27 years on from the Barcelona games, Friends Forever still accurately represents the feeling of locals in Barcelona towards visitors.

And the answer, sadly, is probably no.

Ironically, the change in feeling towards visitors is largely due to the success of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics themselves. The city was fundamentally changed by the games. They put Barcelona on the map. Tourists have flocked to the Catalan capital ever since.

But in the clamour to make Barcelona desirable to outsiders, have long-term residents themselves been ignored?

Olympic memories

The 1992 Barcelona Olympics are the first ones I can remember watching when I was young.

I broke my collarbone playing for the school football team a few days before the summer holidays and was told to take it easy that summer. For an eight year old, those aren’t the words you want to hear.

But the Barcelona Olympics helped to cheer me up that summer. They introduced me to sports I didn’t know existed and to a sunny city by the Mediterranean Sea that until then I knew very little about.

20-odd years later I’d be living in Barcelona. Something the young me who admired the famous view of the city from the Olympic diving pool would have approved of.

As I stand on my balcony in Gràcia today, I can just make out the Olympic Stadium in Montjuic in the distance.

But the Barcelona that stretches from my balcony to the Olympic Stadium is much changed from the city that existed before the games in 1992.

One of the most obvious indicators of that change is also visible from my balcony; a long queue of aeroplanes disappearing behind Montjuic on their way to land at El Prat Airport.

In other words, thousands of tourists arriving every day.

In 1992 Barcelona wasn’t very well known internationally. I only knew it for the football team that had played mine in the 1991 Cup Winners Cup Final and had won the European Cup at Wembley a few months before the Olympic Games.

Now, however, everybody knows about Barcelona.

Credit – Sport Digest

The city that turned its back on the sea

In 1992 the city wasn’t used to receiving visitors.

There were no budget airlines like Vueling or EasyJet back then. The concept of weekend breaks in European cities hadn’t really taken off. What’s more, a lot of the things that attract people to Barcelona today didn’t really exist before the games.

Take the beach, for example. There was a beach in Barcelona before 1992, but it wasn’t the focal point it is today. Locals I speak to remember the seafront as a pretty industrial place. It’s been said that as a city, Barcelona had turned its back on the sea.

It didn’t really look outward.

If you want to see how much the city has changed in the last 25 years or so, go to Poblenou. This barrio was once known as “the Manchester of Catalonia.”

If you go there now, you’ll see some chimneys from its industrial past. But Salford it aint. After all, just as notable as the chimneys is the beach which didn’t really exist before the Olympics.

Poblenou is now a trendy, desirable neighbourhood full of startups, design studios and shiny new co-working spaces.

A tale of two cities

Locals of a certain age think of Barcelona as two different cities. There’s the one that existed before the 1992 Olympics, and then the one that has emerged since.

Pre-1992 Barcelona was a grittier place. But it was theirs.

The process of Barcelona turning proudly toward the Mediterranean once more has made it infinitely more attractive to visitors. And while this has undoubtedly been good for the city, in recent years locals have wondered whether a city transformed by tourism feels like it’s actually theirs anymore.

As local businesses close and are replaced with generic tourist shops selling cheap souvenirs, they’ve begun to ask themselves a question:

Is the city in danger of losing what made it so special in the first place?

A new city

From the outside, it’s quite easy to be critical of the complaints of the locals. Surely they’ve benefited from the amount of tourist money that arrives each year?

But what’s often forgotten is the speed with which their city has changed.

Residents looking out from their balconies might occasionally catch a glimpse of the old Barcelona, but a lot of it was wiped away in the years leading up to the ’92 games. Indeed, it’s difficult to think of another city that’s was so utterly transformed by one planned event.

There are videos on YouTube (like the one below) that show entire areas of Barcelona being dug up and re-designed in the years leading up to the Olympics. Roads that people now use every day to get from one side of the city to the other simply didn’t exist before.

It’s like the city underwent surgery.

The Olympics changed Barcelona in other ways, too.

It is undeniably a more outward looking European city now. Aside from receiving about 10 times as many tourists each year as it did before the games, Barcelona is now recognised internationally as a good place to do business. It’s one of the world’s major conference centres.

This is another obvious benefit of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. And residents admit it. They know they live in a cleaner, shinier, better connected city than the one that existed before the games.

And yet there’s a lot of nostalgia. Locals I’ve spoken to talk fondly of Barcelona in the 1980s.

Some degree of nostalgia is normal everywhere in a globalised and increasingly gentrified world. But it does seem particularly strong in Barcelona. The Olympics were responsible for creating a prettier-looking city that would be nicer for the locals to live in. However, for the very same reason, it joined cities like Venice on the mandatory Mediterranean cruise itinerary.

In recent years a city that wasn’t really accustomed to tourism just over 25 years ago has shown signs that it’s straining under the weight of such high visitor numbers.

It’s been a huge shift for locals to grow accustomed to.

Nostalgia for unity

While some Barcelona residents might sometimes pine for the grittier city they once knew, in other parts of Spain the 1992 Barcelona Olympics generates nostalgia for a different reason.

The games were seen as a triumph not only for Barcelona but for Spain, too. In the current political climate of the Catalan government demanding a referendum on independence, the anniversary of the games is somewhat poignant.

Some articles emerged in the Spanish press after the 25th anniversary lamenting the fact that the culture of unity between Catalonia and Spain that existed then has been lost.

After all, this was an Olympics that felt pretty Spanish. An Olympics where Spanish sport turned a corner and Spanish athletes’ inferiority complex disappeared. An Olympics where the Spanish male football team won gold in a packed Camp Nou with thousands of people waving Spanish flags.

I’ve seen plenty of flags from all over the world in Camp Nou in recent seasons. But I’ve never seen the Spanish flag there.

The legacy of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics

When people talk about Olympic legacies they’re often referring to whether the venues are still being used years later or whether more people have got into sport.

The legacy of Barcelona 1992 is different.

And it’s still being felt now, more than 25 years on. Locals look back on those two weeks with pride, and the vast majority recognise that the investment that shaped a new Barcelona in the years leading up to the games has created a nicer place to live.

However, this regeneration also created new challenges for the city. By advertising a shiny new Barcelona, proudly looking out over the Mediterranean once more, the local government has invited a level of tourism to the city that they’ve often grappled to try to control.

It now feels almost beyond control. Especially as home-rental sites like Airbnb have created thousands of new beds for tourists.

There’s no doubt that the 1992 Barcelona Olympics changed the city forever. However, it feels like the next few years will be crucial in defining how we’ll view its legacy in the future.

The local government must ensure that locals feel the city has changed to benefit them, too.