Bunkers del Carmel

Barcelona holds a grim distinction: it was the first major city in history to be massively and systematically bombed from the air. During the Spanish Civil War, Italian Legionary Air Force planes and the German Condor Legion dropped their payloads on residential neighborhoods, killing an estimated 2,750 people and injuring 7,000 more over roughly 200 bombing raids. In 1938, the Republic built this anti-aircraft battery on the Turo de la Rovira, a 262-metre hilltop in the Carmel neighborhood, to try to defend the city.

After the war ended, the abandoned gun emplacements took on a second life. In the 1940s, families from southern Spain — mostly impoverished migrants who couldn't afford housing — built a shantytown among the bunker ruins called "Els Canons." At its peak, about 110 shacks housed 600 people on this hilltop. The settlement survived for decades until the Barcelona City Council relocated all residents to proper housing before the 1992 Olympics, clearing the site entirely.

The bunkers sat forgotten and overgrown for years until 2011, when MUHBA (the Barcelona History Museum) excavated and partially restored the site, installing a small museum inside one of the bunkers that tells the story of both the wartime battery and the postwar shantytown. It was a neighborhood twice — first as a military installation, then as an informal village — and both layers of history are still visible.

The views are why people come now. At 262 metres above sea level and positioned almost exactly at the geographic center of the city, the Turo de la Rovira offers an unobstructed 360-degree panorama: the Sagrada Familia, the sea, Montjuic, the Eixample grid stretching to the hills. It's free, it's never as crowded as Park Guell, and at sunset it might be the best seat in Barcelona.