Barcelona

Changing this current slide of this carousel will change the current slide of the thumbnail carousel that follows. Changing the current slide of this carousel will change the current slide of the preceding main images/videos carousel. Although the tradition of gardening has always existed in cities in the form of private gardens, allotments and greenhouses, public green areas do not appear until after the industrial revolution. The need for manual workers in the industrial areas brought large numbers of workers into the cities, causing a progressive lack of living space. This overcrowding was accompanied by an insufficient sanitary system, a total lack of hygiene and pollution produced by factories. The concept of a "public park", an area created and financed by the city government for the free use of the inhabitants, came about therefore, due to the need to oxygenate the city in order to make it healthier as well as to create areas for relaxation and leisure activities. In Barcelona, the creation of public green areas started with the growth of the city after the demolishing of the city walls in 1854. However, the first green public area dates back to 1816: the General's Garden, created by Francisco de Castaños, Governor General of the Principality. This garden was situated between the present day Avinguda Marquès de l'Argentera and Ciutadella, just in front of where the Estació França stands today. It had a surface area of 0.4 hectares, which was extended to 0.5 in 1840 to mark the first visit made to the city by Queen Isabel II. Unfortunately, this park was closed in 1862, a short time before the land occupied by the military barracks was procured by Barcelona with the aim of creating a large public park. In 1872, the Barcelona council approved the project presented by the master designer Josep Fontserè i Mestre to build the Parc de la Ciutadella. Since the construction of Parc de la Ciutadella, and from the beginning of the 20th century, the number and size of public green areas in Barcelona has not ceased to grow. This other famous exhibition, the 1929 International Exhibition, was the event which instigated the creation of gardens in an area of Barcelona which was very popular among the city's inhabitants: the Montjuïc mountain, where the abundance of vegetation and natural fountains had given rise to many popular allotments and the use of the mountain as an area for leisure and country walks. At the request of the architects Josep Amargós and Josep Puig i Cadafalch, the organizers of the Exhibition commissioned the French landscape engineer Jean-Claude-Nicolas Forestier, park keeper of the Paris parks, to create gardens on a part of the mountain. In order to carry out this project, the French engineer was helped by Nicolau Maria Rubió i Tudurí, a tandem which left behind an important legacy within the green areas of Barcelona. Thus, as well as the creation of the Montjuïc Gardens: the Laribal Gardens, Font del Gat (today integrated into the Laribal Gardens), the Amargós Gardens -today the Teatre Grec Gardens - and others, we should add the Plaça d'Armes Park (1915) the Parc de la Ciutadella and the historical part of Guinardó Park (1918). In 1923 Parc Güell, designed by Antoni Gaudí, was inaugurated,. In order to give coherence to the policy of municipal acquisition of land, Rubió created a rational structure of distribution of free areas which he set down in a paper titled "The problem of open areas", presented in 1926 at the eleventh National Congress of Architects. In this document, Rubió i Tudurí records the general idea which had been presented in the Linking Network Plan by Léon Jaussely in 1905, on the need to create a complete system of green areas divided into different levels according to their use and characteristics (forests, parks and children's gardens, etc). The result was a semicircle enclosed by the landscape reserve of Collserola, to which the rings of the external parks were concentrically f