An investment of 40 million euros and the start of works scheduled for 2024. Objective: to convert the old Palau Municipal d'Esports, at the foot of Montjuïc, into the Barcelona Sports Hub, a center for innovation and technologies applied to sports. sport and dedicated in part to e-sports, although maintaining a space dedicated to traditional sports uses. From that announcement launched by the then first lieutenant and now mayor of the city, Jaume Collboni, in April 2022, during the celebration of the first ReAct conferences (economic reactivation of Barcelona after the pandemic), there remains the firm commitment of the municipal government to move forward with the initiative, but both the estimated budget and, above all, the calendar have been blown up.
"The project of the Palau Municipal d'Esports converted into a center for the practice of e-sports and the incubation of digital sports companies is still standing," say sources from the City Council consulted by La Vanguardia, who add that the municipal government is working with the idea of having a functional plan ready throughout 2024, a prior step to the drafting of the executive project and the beginning of works that, today, are not visible in the calendar before the final stretch of the municipal mandate 2023-2027.
The Collboni government wants the Barcelona Sports Hub, a project that has another leg in the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys (an incubator for emerging companies in the sports tech sector), to be an example of maximum public-private collaboration, which the old Lleida Street, duly remodeled, generates its own activity and is economically viable.
An added problem that is delaying the start-up of this project has to do with the characteristics of the space chosen for its location. The Palau Municipal d'Esports is a pavilion with almost 70 years of history and which has now been inactive for 15 years, since the Barcelona Teatre Musical (BTM) installed there closed in 2000. Some posters hanging from the exterior walls of the venue They still remember today that last use before its closure.
The uniqueness of this building makes it the victim of a painful paradox that afflicts many properties with a long history of life that are intended to breathe new life into after a long period of disuse if not abandonment. And the Montjuïc multi-sports trip is classified with a level of protection C (Good with elements of interest) which, although it saves you from being a victim of the pickaxe, also makes your functional adaptation extremely difficult.
The catalog file of the architectural heritage of Barcelona corresponding to the Palau Municipal d'Esports indicates that any intervention in this building is subject to the obligation to maintain the volume, the facades and the interior elements of interest, especially the structure to cover a light of 65 meters formed by eight tri-articulated arches of reinforced concrete that in its day made this pavilion the only high-capacity covered facility (8,000 spectators initially, which were reduced in successive remodeling) existing in the city until the construction of the Palau Blaugrana at the beginning of the seventies of the last century.
Precisely, the difficulties in readapting the structure of the Palau Municipal d'Esports to other uses was one of the reasons – not the only one – why the attempt of the first Ada Colau government to locate the city's joint police room there (Guardia Urbana, Mossos d'Esquadra, firefighters and technical services) fell on deaf ears and was definitively discarded.
Meanwhile, inactivity and the passage of time has left its mark on this old sports venue where these days a large crane was carrying out maintenance work on the tower located on the corner of Guàrdia Urbana and Segons Jocs Mediterranis streets, a tower in which five endearing Olympic rings are visible that remind us that the volleyball and rhythmic gymnastics competitions of Barcelona'92 were held here.
While waiting for better times, the Palau Municipal d'Esports has long since become a shelter for homeless people. Specifically, the main façade that faces Lleida Street is a small settlement made of tents, cardboard and fabrics where people who have settled in this place, just a few meters away, congregate daily, in conditions of absolute precariousness. the headquarters of the Territorial Unit of the Urban Guard of the Sants-Montjuïc district, taking advantage of the fact that it is a discreet and little-trafficked space.
