Barcelona will have a new tourist attraction in 2022. The third tallest building in the Catalan capital, the Torre Glòries, will open a viewpoint during the first quarter that will allow visitors to enjoy a 360º view of the city at 140 meters high. The experience will also allow admiring a work of art that will be installed in the dome, by the renowned Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno.
It is a spectacular and large-scale piece that will become Saraceno's first major work permanently installed in Spain. In addition, Torre Glòries will become the first international non-museum space to permanently house a piece by this author. Based in Berlin, Studio Saraceno's works have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale and in museums in Europe, Asia and America, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art or the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow), among others.
Visitors to the viewpoint will enjoy the experience of ascending the building's 34 floors in a few seconds by elevator, but before heading to the dome, they can participate in a multimedia exhibition equipped with the latest audiovisual technologies located in the basement. The details of this museum proposal are unknown, whose conception the real estate company Merlin Properties commissioned Mediapro Exhibitions, the division of Grupo Mediapro specialized in the creation and development of museographic projects and the management of cultural and leisure spaces.
According to sources familiar with the project who spoke to The New Barcelona Post, the civil work necessary for the launch of the viewpoint is about to be completed, after several months of work. The idea is that this physical adaptation of the building will be finished this September and that throughout the last quarter of the year the final works and the installation of the exhibition will be carried out to be able to inaugurate the attraction at the beginning of 2022. The most notable action of this phase of civil work has been the reconversion of the last two floors of the dome into a single floor to install the viewpoint and create the space where Saraceno's piece will be located.
Visitors to the Torre Glòries viewpoint will enter through a different door than the main access to the tower, so that tourists will not mix at any time with the people who work in the office tower. The idea is that they enter from street level and first go down to the basement, where they can visit the interactive exhibition before taking the exclusive-use elevator that will take them to the dome.
The cost of tickets and when they can be purchased online is unknown, but it is expected that Mediapro will also be in charge of the commercialization and management of the new tourist attraction. Prior to the Torre Glòries viewpoint, Mediapro Exhibitions had developed projects such as the Sala de l'Univers of CosmoCaixa, the Camp Nou Experience or Territorio Atleti, the museum of Club Atlético de Madrid, among others.
The listed real estate company Merlin Properties, led by Ismael Clemente, bought the former Torre Agbar for 142 million euros at the beginning of 2017 after a project to transform the then corporate headquarters of the water distribution group into a luxury hotel failed. After remodeling the different floors of the building, Merlin put the tower on the office rental market and from the beginning outlined the idea of transforming the dome into a viewpoint open to the public that would offer unique views of the city. According to the sources consulted, despite covid, the project has gone ahead and is now in the final stretch to make it a reality.
Bullet-shaped and inaugurated in 2005, the emblematic skyscraper designed by architects Jean Nouvel and Fermín Vázquez has become one of the icons of Barcelona's skyline. It is located at the confluence of Avenida Diagonal with Plaça de les Glòries, in the 22@ district, and has 34 floors above ground, an auditorium and four underground floors with 300 parking spaces. According to Merlin, the building's gross leasable area is 37,614 square meters.