The Poble Espanyol is not an old village, and it does not pretend to be one. It is a village built on Montjuïc for the 1929 International Exhibition, with 117 life-size buildings reproducing houses, churches, squares and gateways from almost every region of Spain, from Romanesque to Baroque. It was supposed to be demolished when the fair ended.
You visit it like an open-air museum of Spanish architecture: you go in through a gateway from Ávila, cross an Aragonese square and end up in an Andalusian alley, while real craftspeople work in the workshops around you. The ticket is cheaper if you buy it online at least the day before rather than on the day, and the village stays open until midnight almost every day.
How do you choose which houses to copy, to fit a whole country on a hill?
A village for the 1929 Exhibition
The idea was to gather in one place the architectural and cultural essence of Spain. The project was signed by four people: Miquel Utrillo, painter and engineer, who led the group, the draughtsman Xavier Nogués and the architects Francesc Folguera and Ramon Reventós.
The answer to the question is a journey. Before finalising the project, the four visited more than 1,600 villages all over Spain, and from that journey they chose the buildings to reproduce. Construction began on 19 January 1928 and the village was inaugurated on 20 May 1929.
Reventós wrote, in December 1929, that the first houses on the square had been ready within a few days, and that stepping into the village you felt something like the emotion of travelling through Spain. It is still the place’s promise.
From the Torres de Ávila to the Plaza Mayor
You enter through a fortified gateway between two crenellated towers, the reproduction of the Torres de Ávila, the walls of the Castilian city.
Beyond the gateway you reach the Plaza Mayor, the heart of the village. Look at the stone building with the arcades and the row of small arches under the roof: it is the copy of the town hall of Valderrobres, a village in Aragon. Around the square the houses change region from one side to the other.
A tour of Spain in an afternoon
What do you actually see, in a village made of copies?
You see, with the houses side by side, how much architecture changes from one region to another. The village is divided into areas: the houses of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, those of the Cantabrian coast, Cervantes’s La Mancha, Andalusia. Walking through it means passing in a few minutes from stone to brick, from the wooden balconies of the north to the whitewash of the south.
The Gradas de Santiago, a flight of steps, are lined with houses with wooden balconies, and at the top rises the brick façade of the church of Alcañiz.
The Andalusian quarter is the most photographed part. The alleys are narrow and whitewashed, and on one of the little squares a white wall is covered in blue pots of geraniums, around a small niche with a statue.
It was meant to be demolished
Why is a village built for a fair still here, almost a hundred years later?
Because of its success. The village was conceived as temporary, and at the end of the fair it was to be pulled down. During the months of the Exhibition it hosted folk dances, parades and horse-riding competitions every day, and its own creators decided it should stay.
The years that followed were less happy. During the Civil War the village became an internment camp for prisoners; after the war the City Council spread the Museum of Popular Arts and Industries across its buildings, to stop them falling into ruin. Only in 1986 did management pass into private hands and the original buildings get restored. The village really began to recover from 1996, under new management.
Workshops and a contemporary art museum
The Poble Espanyol is not only for looking at. Craftspeople from different trades work in its streets every day, from ceramics to painted glass, from embroidery to jewellery, and many run short workshops for passers-by.
Since 2001 there has also been the Fran Daurel Museum, a private collection of contemporary Spanish art, with works by Picasso, Dalí and Miró. If on the same day you go to the Museu Picasso or the Fundació Joan Miró, here you see the same names in a small and different collection.
Practical information
Details checked on 28 October 2026 on the official website, poble-espanyol.com. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
On the same hill, a little lower down, is the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, built for the same Exhibition with opposite ideas, and further on the Fundació Joan Miró. To get back to Gaudí, in the centre there is Palau Güell, next to the Rambla.
Photographs: the Plaza Mayor, the Gradas de Santiago and the Andalusian quarter, by Enric, CC BY-SA 4.0; the Torres de Ávila, by Enfo, CC BY-SA 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons; the 1929 photographs, from the magazine Estampa, in the public domain.
