Barcelona is today connected by air to 66 countries — 221 destinations — via 379 routes. Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport ended 2025 with 57.5 million passengers and 360,786 operations, record figures that position it as one of the city's major gateways and make it the sixth-busiest airport in the European Union. But the story behind today's figures stretches back more than a century, to 1916, when Barcelona's first airfield was built at El Remolar, on the grounds of the La Volatería farm, from which it initially took its name.
Two years later, in 1918, the airfield moved to land in El Prat de Llobregat, a few hundred meters from the original location. That first aerodrome was home to the Aeroclub de Catalunya and served as a base for airships and seaplanes belonging to the Navy and the Army. From the outset, it had an international vocation, thanks to the French aviator and industrialist Pierre-Georges Latécoère.
On December 25, 1918, Latécoère arrived at El Prat aboard a Salmson 300, as part of the project to create a major airline between Toulouse, Casablanca, Dakar and, later, South America. A few months later, in September 1919, two Breguet XIV planes from Latécoère Airlines took off from Toulouse bound for Morocco and made a stopover in El Prat, before continuing to Alicante and Rabat. The next day they arrived in Rabat with the first letters of the Franco-Moroccan postal service. From its earliest days, then, El Prat was already part of the first international air routes connecting Europe with North Africa.
Those were postal routes, however. The first regular commercial services did not arrive until 1927, when Iberia inaugurated its first line, between Barcelona and Madrid's Cuatro Vientos airport. Almost three decades later, in 1963, the airport exceeded one million passengers for the first time. And seven years later, in 1970, Pan American inaugurated the New York-Lisbon-Barcelona connection with a Boeing 747 and the Barcelona-Madrid air shuttle was launched. In 1977, traffic exceeded five million passengers.
But the great leap that would ultimately establish the airport as the major international infrastructure it is today came with the Barcelona Olympics. In 1992, the expansion of Terminal B and the new Terminals A and C came into service. That same year, the airport exceeded 10 million passengers for the first time.
The last great leap? That came in 2009, when the current Terminal 1 came into service, the great transformation that would finally turn Barcelona-El Prat into the major international airport it is today, capable of handling more than 57 million passengers in a year.
Returning to the present, after this brief look back: the airport recorded nearly 5.9 million passengers in July of this year alone. That brings the total to 34.2 million passengers on commercial flights so far this year, according to Aena data, 4.7% more than in the same period in 2025. Of those, 25.9 million were international travelers and the remaining 8.3 million domestic, roughly the usual split for Barcelona's airport: 75% international and 25% domestic.
According to the latest data published by Aena, the airport handled 35,886 aircraft operations in July, bringing the 2026 total to 215,228. As for cargo, 20,435 tons of freight were transported in July, an 8.1% increase over July of last year, bringing the annual total to 125,309 tons.
Ninety airlines currently operate from Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport. Among them, five account for the bulk of traffic: Vueling, with 40% of the market share and 22.7 million passengers in 2025; Ryanair, with 16%; Wizz Air, with 5%; easyJet; with another 5%, and Iberia; with 4%.
221 destinations: where does Barcelona fly to?
Europe remains by far Barcelona's main hub of connectivity, with Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany as the main destination countries. But the airport's network also extends far beyond the European continent: the 379 routes connect Barcelona with 221 destinations in 66 different countries.
Asia is one region where Barcelona has been especially ramping up connectivity. This summer, in fact, the airport has celebrated reaching its most extensive network of connections with the continent, with direct flights to Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Seoul. In fact, the Barcelona Air Route Development Committee has made consolidating current connectivity and expanding Barcelona's presence in major Asian markets a priority in its 2026–2030 Strategic Plan.
This summer the airport has reached its most extensive network of connections with the Asian continent
But Asia is not yet the airport's main market. In 2025, flights originating from or destined for America moved 3.5 million passengers, while connections with the Middle East and Asia added 2.7 million. Africa, for its part, accounted for 1.8 million passengers.
However global the network may be, the bulk of Barcelona-El Prat's traffic remains distinctly European. The routes with the most passengers are Palma de Mallorca (2.4 million passengers in 2025), followed by Madrid (1.8 million), Rome (1.7 million), Amsterdam (1.6 million), and Lisbon (1.4 million).
The passenger: who flies to Barcelona?
According to Aena's annual report, 56% of passengers at El Prat airport travel for holidays or leisure, while 22% do so to visit family or friends and 17% for business or work reasons. Regarding their origin, 40% reside in the province of Barcelona, 22% in the rest of Spain, and 38% are foreign residents. By nationality, the distribution is almost half and half: 53% Spanish and 47% foreign.
We also know that the most common passenger is between 30 and 49 years old, a range that accounts for 42% of the total, followed by young people between 15 and 29 years old, who represent 32%.
Now what? The airport expansion
The debate about the expansion of Barcelona-El Prat has accompanied the airport's growth for years. At the end of 2019, when traffic exceeded 52 million passengers, Aena began to propose a new major investment in anticipation of the facilities reaching capacity. The project planners quickly ruled out building a fourth runway into the sea due to the environmental impact it would have had.
The plan, however, soon ran into strong political, social, and environmental opposition, which intensified through 2021, until it was shelved that summer. Over the following years, the debate stalled, even as the business sector continued to push various alternatives.
But the situation began to change in 2024, when the Generalitat and the Ministry of Transport activated a technical commission to study the future of the airport in view of a faster-than-expected recovery in traffic after the pandemic. In 2025, under the Generalitat's new government, the project was put back on the table with a concrete proposal: extending the third runway — the one closest to the sea — by 500 meters, paired with an environmental compensation plan involving more than 250 hectares of renaturalization in the Llobregat Delta.
The current roadmap foresees an investment of €3.2 billion, with major construction set to begin in 2029 and the new infrastructure completed by around 2034. Before that, however, compensation and environmental renaturalization work would need to get underway.
The expansion itself is not yet under construction — what's been set in motion is the planning. In July 2026, Aena awarded the contract to draft the airport's new Master Plan and its Strategic Environmental Assessment, a five-year, €2.68 million contract. This document will have to specify how the airport will be transformed over the coming decades and complete the necessary environmental approvals. The forecast is that the new Master Plan will be approved in 2029.
In the meantime, Barcelona-El Prat is expanding its capacity without waiting for the larger works to begin. The airport is putting €800 million toward various projects aimed at growing Terminal 1 by some 70,000 square meters (a 15.5% increase in floor space) and giving Terminal 2 its most significant overhaul since it was built, with an investment of €153.4 million.
The expansion also seeks to strengthen long-haul flights and consolidate Barcelona as an international hub:
With its expansion proposal, Aena is looking to raise capacity to 70 million passengers, but its ambitions go beyond sheer numbers. The expansion also aims to strengthen long-haul flights and cement Barcelona's status as an international hub — an airport where a share of passengers are not headed to Barcelona as their final destination, but arrive to connect to another flight and continue on to a third city. A Barcelona that functions in the air not just as a destination, but as a point of connection between Europe and the rest of the world.