With the first half of September behind us, summer is finally starting to fade. Days without a schedule, afternoons by the sea and holidays are now just memories, as evenings draw in and routine reclaims its place. September has us running again: between timetables, obligations and a diary that keeps filling up, the city settles back into its usual rhythm.
Even so, the high temperatures still offer an excuse to stretch summer out a little further. This weekend's cultural calendar also invites you to make the most of this grace period before autumn: bidding farewell to festival season with Festival·B, touring Barcelona one artisan ice cream at a time, discovering new exhibitions and contemporary art spaces, eating in the street or stepping into corners of the city that usually go unnoticed are just some of what's on offer from 17 to 20 September. All in a weekend that combines summer's last echoes with the start of the new cultural season.
Bidding farewell to big festival season
17–19 September, at Parc del Fòrum
Just when it seemed summer had already left the season of big festivals and concert nights behind, Festival·B offers one last gasp of the season. From 17 to 19 September, Parc del Fòrum will once again host three days of concerts championing, as the name suggests, music's B-side. It's a label that has blurred over the years: several artists who once played its stages as alternative names have gone on to become regulars on the biggest bills.
That's true of much of this year's line-up. Yung Beef, Rusowsky, Guitarricadelafuente and Mushka are some of the names who, while not quite as indie as they usd to be, still project an alternative aura. The bill also includes Maria Arnal, La Plazuela, Sanguijuelas del Guadiana, mvrk, D. Valentino, Claudio Montana, Cupido, Jimena Amarillo, Juicy Bae and Leïti, among many others. With more than thirty acts showcasing the current vanguard of urban, alternative, and emerging music, festivalgoers have plenty of routes to plot between stages.
Touring Barcelona one artisan ice cream at a time
From September 15 to 20, at 15 ice cream parlors in the city
If Festival·B lets us stretch the festival season out a little further, there are more obvious ways to keep feeling summer's essence. The most obvious? Eating ice cream. And these days the city offers the perfect excuse: from 15 to 20 September, fifteen Barcelona ice-cream parlours are taking part in Gelato Week for the first time, an initiative inviting you to explore the city through its artisan ice creams.
The offering is organised into three routes: Gràcia, Diagonal and Verdaguer; Esquerra de l'Eixample and Sants; and Ciutat Vella and Poblenou. Each shop has prepared an exclusive flavour for the occasion. With a €12 ticket for a tub or €16 for a cone, you can try up to five ice creams from shops like Delacrem, Bibì e Bibò, Pot and Gocce di latte. Standout flavours on offer include honey and ricotta, cream with ratafia and carquinyolis, and chocolate with olive oil and sea salt.
Warming up for La Mercè through 48 posters
15 September – 12 October, in the courtyard of the Museu Frederic Marès
With Barcelona's biggest festival just a week away, La Mercè is already popping up all over the city. This year, though, the festival invites you in through an unusual route: the 'Moltes Mercès' depicted across its many posters. The courtyard of the Museu Frederic Marès brings together the festival's 48 official posters, from 1979 to 2026. Almost fifty years of images show how the festival has changed, and how the aesthetics and visual identity of Barcelona have evolved alongside it.
Behind these images are names including Antoni Tàpies, Javier Mariscal, Jaume Plensa, Malika Favre and Cinta Vidal, among many other artists. For anyone who wants to spend some time with it, or would rather do so from home, the exhibition has also been turned into a book published by Barcelona Llibres, bringing together the whole collection and turning La Mercè's posters into a singular visual record of the city.
Visiting a never-opened metro station in Barcelona
18–20 September
Between the busy stations of Sagrada Família and Sant Pau | Dos de Maig lies a secret stop most passengers have never seen. Not because it's hidden, or because it's part of a line still under construction, but because every train simply passes it by: it's Gaudí station, which never actually opened and today is one of the ghost stops on Barcelona's metro network. This weekend, though, the space will stop being off-limits, opening its doors for European Mobility Week.
The visit to Gaudí station is only one of the doors TMB will open this week. Visitors will also be able to see the Santa Eulàlia repair workshops, the network's oldest and running since 1922, as well as those at the Zona d'Activitats Logístiques, with more than 10,000 square metres given over to train maintenance. And, to round off the journey through Barcelona's transport history, TMB's historic buses will be out on show along Passeig de Gràcia on 18 and 19 September.
El Born turns the street into one long table
18–20 September, at Pla de Palau
Summer is also synonymous with outdoor plans and street dining. And even if September already has us back in our routines, El Born still wants to make the most of the last days of good weather. From 18 to 20 September, Pla de Palau will become an extension of the neighbourhood's restaurants with a new edition of Born Street Food.
Sixteen restaurants will bring dishes designed for eating in the street, from butifarra sausage and smash burgers to surf-and-turf noodles, arròs brut, focaccia and cochinita tacos. Among the participants will be some festival regulars, such as 1881 by Sagardi, Cadaqués, Oaxaca and Ikoya, plus four newcomers: Espai Puntal, Bar Super, Arcano and David Barroso, from Mercat de Santa Caterina.
More room for contemporary art in Poble-sec
Carrer de Lafont, 24 (Sants-Montjuïc)
An art gallery can be much more than somewhere to hang paintings. Homesession has spent years working along these lines in Poble-sec, combining exhibitions with artist residencies, project production and creative spaces. Now it's taking things a step further, opening a new 250-square-metre space on Carrer de Lafont, also in the neighbourhood, which lets it expand on this way of working.
The first show it's presenting is That's Where I'm Going: Echoes of What Was and Never Returned, an exhibition that traces Homesession's trajectory through works its artists have produced during their programmes. Nineteen artists take part with pieces that now come together again and strike up new dialogues in this new space. Among the names taking part are Carolina Cordeiro, Daniel de la Barra, Daniela Ortiz, Eulàlia Rovira, Joan Pallé and Paul Maheke.
Barcelona becomes one big open-air bookshop
18–27 September, at Passeig de Lluís Companys
When we think of Barcelona's great celebration of literature, we usually mean Sant Jordi: crowded streets, red roses and book stalls all over the city. September, however, has its own way of celebrating books too, a quieter but longer one: for ten days, La Setmana del Llibre en Català takes over Passeig de Lluís Companys, turning the space into a meeting point for authors, publishers, booksellers and readers of Catalan literature.
This year's edition, under the slogan So Much to See, So Much to Read, will bring together as many as 282 publishers spread across 98 stalls and 9,000 square metres. An extensive programme of talks, conversations, literary routes, family activities and a freestyle-style book battle rounds out a line-up that goes well beyond the stalls. And there will be no shortage of authors either: Llucia Ramis, Care Santos, Empar Moliner, Ramon Solsona, Màrius Serra and Biel Mesquida are among the names set to make an appearance on Passeig de Lluís Companys.
Singing along again to The Sound of Music
Until 27 September, at Teatre Apolo
Even if it's been a while since we last revisited it, a few notes are all it takes to be transported, in an instant, back to the mountains of Austria. To Maria, to Captain Von Trapp's seven children and to songs that have travelled through decades and generations. The Sound of Music, the musical Julie Andrews brought to the big screen in 1965, is now back on stage in Barcelona. Teatre Apolo is now revisiting this classic alongside Theatre Properties, for two weeks only, from 17 to 27 September.
The actress Silvia Villaú takes on the role of Maria and also directs the production, while Carlos Benito plays Captain Von Trapp. The story is once again set in Austria in the late 1930s, with a set design recreating that era.
Chamber music sounds out among Modernista buildings
15–23 September, at the Recinte Modernista de Sant Pau and the Petit Palau of the Palau de la Música
A unique way of taking in a concert: closer, more intimate, without the distance of the big auditoriums. From 15 to 23 September, the Festival de Sant Pau champions this closeness with six recitals split across its second edition between the Recinte Modernista de Sant Pau and the Petit Palau.
The programme spans different composers and eras, ranging from Max Richter and Shostakovich to Prokofiev and Brahms. This Saturday, 19 September, it's the latter who takes centre stage, in a concert closing with his Piano Quartet No. 1.
The abstract world of Romà Vallès
Until 17 January, at Espais Volart (Fundació Vila Casas)
Before abstraction became a fully established language in the art world, Romà Vallès was already searching for his own way to move away from figurative painting. Over six decades of work, the Barcelona-born artist explored colour, material and composition in a constant search for an ever more abstract horizon. Now, Fundació Vila Casas's Espais Volart traces this trajectory with an exhibition tracking his evolution from his earliest experiments to his final years.
The show also revives a little-known but significant relationship: the one Vallès had with Josep Maria de Sucre, a singular figure among the Catalan avant-gardes. The two shared concerns and friendship and even came together on a project for a museum of contemporary art in Barcelona driven forward with Alexandre Cirici-Pellicer and Rodríguez-Aguilera.
What if your life were a play?
From 18 September, at Espai Texas
What if that story you're always telling your friends turned into a scene? What if a break-up, a disastrous holiday or a chance encounter suddenly became the plotline of a play worth staging? That's the premise behind Biopic, the Impro Barcelona show coming to Espai Texas to turn real life into a piece of theatre that will exist for one night only.
It all starts with an audience member willing to share a few episodes from their life. From there, four performers pick up characters, memories and situations and transform them on the spot into a kind of theatrical film. There is no script and no story prepared: each performance becomes a one-off show.
Barcelona kicks off the contemporary art season
17–20 September, across 25 galleries in Barcelona and L'Hospitalet de Llobregat
While we're still looking for excuses to stretch summer out, the city's art galleries are already thinking about the new cultural season. From 17 to 20 September, the Barcelona Gallery Weekend once again marks the start of the art season with 38 exhibitions across 25 galleries in Barcelona and L'Hospitalet.
There is no single theme running through the 38 exhibitions, but there are some concerns that keep coming up, like identity, displacement and memory. Nor do the works share a single visual language: painting, drawing, photography, installation, textiles and light all coexist in a programme that lets you jump from one space to another and discover very different ways of understanding art.
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