The relocation of Hospital Clínic to Diagonal is beginning to take shape. After decades of discussion about where the healthcare center should be relocated, its future campus on the current sports fields of the University of Barcelona (UB) is increasingly close to becoming a reality. The Generalitat estimates that construction will begin in 2030, to be able to launch it in late 2035 or early 2036.
The future healthcare campus will occupy an area of more than 30,000 square meters in the upper Diagonal area, where the different care, teaching, and research functions will be brought together, and will involve an investment currently estimated at 1.7 billion euros. To make this new center a reality, which will concentrate the new Hospital Clínic and the new Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of the UB and other pioneering research centers, a mixed monitoring commission was established in October to define and coordinate the project.
The commission, formed by representatives of the Generalitat, the city councils of Barcelona, L'Hospitalet and Esplugues de Llobregat, the Diputació de Barcelona, the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB), the Hospital Clínic Consortium and the UB, and under the coordination of Juan Echániz, has drafted the statutes of the new consortium that will coordinate the project of the future campus, dubbed Porta Diagonal-Campus Clínic. A new entity that will be launched next year, also joining the monitoring commission, and which will be responsible not only for ensuring coordination between the different institutions, but also for acting as a technical, operational, and management office to make the new hospital complex a reality.
Thus, the consortium will lead the necessary actions for the materialization of the campus, resolving the different open fronts, which include the bidding for projects, as well as the design of the new buildings or the extension of metro line L3 to ensure the connectivity of this new center. With the forecast of starting works in 2030, the Generalitat will undertake the process of drafting an Urban Master Plan to define the planning of the future campus and its surroundings, which will be drafted and processed between this year and 2027. Thus, the construction projects would be developed between 2027 and 2028, with the forecast of finishing the works on the buildings and the new metro station by 2035.
This project will unblock the necessary expansion of the Clínic, which has been unresolved for more than two decades, since the facilities, boxed into the l'Esquerra de l'Eixample framework, have become too small and outdated years ago, and will represent one of the great urban transformations of the next decade. "The future Clínic is not only a hospital for the city of Barcelona or its metropolitan region, but for all of Catalonia, which wants to become a reference center not only in Southern Europe, but in Europe as a whole to lead the way medicine, research and teaching are done in the field of health," said the Minister of the Presidency, Albert Dalmau, who heads the mixed monitoring commission.
In fact, the upper part of Diagonal is emerging as a European biomedical hub not only with the arrival of the future Clínic, but also with other actors in the health and research ecosystem, such as Sant Joan de Déu or the Barcelona Science Park (PCB) immersed in their own transformation and expansion processes. For this reason, one of the key aspects of the project was to ensure the connectivity and accessibility of this new biomedical centrality of the city.
To guarantee this connectivity, the Department of Territory has tendered the update of the project for the extension of metro line L3, from Zona Universitària to Esplugues Centre, with 2.5 kilometers and two new stops. To provide accessibility not only to Hospital Clínic, but also to Sant Joan de Déu, the idea is for both hospitals to share a stop, called Sant Joan de Déu-Finestrelles, with a different exit for each of the health centers. In addition to the stop to connect the future Clínic and Sant Joan de Déu, the L3 will also reach the center of Esplugues, with a second stop in Santa Magdalena square, in front of the City Hall, also guaranteeing the connectivity of the town, which until now does not have a metro to travel to the center of Barcelona.
The drafting of this extension project has been tendered for an amount of 4.5 million euros and with a drafting period of one year. According to the Infrastructure Master Plan (PDI) of the Barcelona Metropolitan Region 2021-2030, L3 should add a total of nine stops ---including the two already tendered--- to reach Sant Feliu de Llobregat, which will be tendered in a second phase.
A horizontal and green campus
During the meeting of the mixed monitoring commission, the four projects emerged from the Master's in Hospital Architecture were also presented. A master's with a unique edition, which began in September last year, jointly organized by the University of Barcelona (UB) and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), with the intention that these works serve to lay the foundations for the call for the international competition for the new campus that the healthcare center plans to launch by the end of 2026, coinciding with Barcelona's distinction as World Capital of Architecture.
The projects have been materialized in four models that will be incorporated as inspiration into the international competition's guidelines. All works share elements such as the horizontality of the buildings, which opts for wider rather than taller constructions, as well as the centrality of green spaces, which even include therapeutic gardens for patients, around which the other buildings will be articulated. However, these works "can be used, manipulated, and changed," as highlighted by Ramon Sanabria, architect and director of the Master's, who emphasized that these models should serve as a "reference for the space and its possibilities."
Until the works on the future campus are completed, the Clínic will carry out a progressive and adaptive transformation of its current headquarters on Villarroel Street. With the relocation of the Clínic to Diagonal, a space in the Eixample will be freed up, and the mixed monitoring commission will also be responsible for redefining the uses that this facility will have once the relocation of the hospital center is completed.