The Teatro Principal will reopen with immersive art in 2024

The Teatre Principal, the oldest in Barcelona and an icon of La Rambla, will come back to life. A week after approving the reform to update the city's most popular promenade, the Government of Ada Colau and the building's promoters, the Inversiones Hoteleras Atir group, have reached an agreement to recover this historic building, closed since 2017.

With the agreement, the Teatre Principal will be transformed into a cultural project focused on the audiovisual field and immersive art, with the forecast of opening it in 2024. Large-format and large-scale immersive art space exhibitions will be held. According to the municipal executive, it will become the first installation of its kind in Europe.

Likewise, the Principal will program its most characteristic offer, theatrical, but it will do so through immersive theater plays that will take advantage of the building's configuration and physical characteristics. The plays will develop dynamically and not in a static physical space, with the audience at the center, a format that is already being developed in London and New York. This mix of uses will allow it to update its historical function as a multifunctional space in the city, having hosted very varied activities, such as cinema, concerts, cabaret, operas, pelota exhibitions, billiards, or a discotheque. It even housed the Ateneu Barcelonès.

The Inversiones Hoteleras Atir group, with José María Trénor as CEO, will be in charge of managing the new facility and will be responsible for completely remodeling the building. Trénor, co-owner of the Cotton House Hotel and founder of Praktic Hoteles, will invest a total of 25 million euros in the renovation.

With more than 11,000 square meters of floor space, the renovation will maintain the facade and the heritage character of the building. The Principal will have six halls ---Teatro Principal, Teatro Latino, Cúpula Venus, Espacio Rambles, Jai Alai and Espacio Lancaster-Pequeño Frontón---, with a capacity for about 2,500 people. The different halls will communicate through an interior space that will act as an open passage and will connect La Rambla and Lancaster Street. On the rooftop, there will be photovoltaic panels.