Montjuïc, Barcelona: Things to Do and How to Get Up the Hill

Montjuïc is the wooded hill above Barcelona’s port that holds the city’s largest art museum, a 17th-century castle, the 1992 Olympic ring and the Magic Fountain. Montjuïc rises 177 m (581 ft), with the castle’s fortifications on a higher point at about 185 m (607 ft), and you can reach the top on foot in about 25 minutes, by funicular and cable car, or by the separate port cable car from Barceloneta. The name translates as “Jewish Mountain” in both Catalan and medieval Latin, and although nobody is certain where it came from, there is an old Jewish cemetery on the hill.

Two events made Montjuïc what it is. The 1929 International Exposition covered its slopes with pavilions, fountains and museums, and the 1992 Olympic Games filled its flat summit with stadiums and a communications tower. Almost everything worth seeing up here dates from one of the two.

How to get to Montjuïc

You can get to Montjuïc four ways, and the choice matters because two of them are called cable cars and they are not the same thing. The routes are listed below, cheapest first.

1. On foot from Plaça d’Espanya. The walk up past the Magic Fountain and the MNAC takes about 25 minutes, and outdoor escalators cover the steepest stretch beside the museum steps. This is the free option and the one I would pick going up.
2. Funicular de Montjuïc. Take the metro to Paral·lel and change to the funicular, which is part of the metro network, so an ordinary metro ticket covers it. It sets you down at Parc de Montjuïc, near the Miró Foundation.
3. Telefèric de Montjuïc. The gondola runs 750 m from the top of the funicular up to the castle entrance, which is the only way to ride to the castle door without walking. Separate ticket.
4. Transbordador Aeri del Port. The old red port cable car crosses the harbour from Torre Sant Sebastià in Barceloneta to Miramar on Montjuïc. It has the better view and the longer queue, and it is a different service with a different ticket from the Telefèric.

The mistake people make is booking one cable car and turning up at the other. If your plan starts at the beach, you want the Transbordador Aeri; if it starts at Plaça d’Espanya or Paral·lel, you want the funicular and then the Telefèric. Taking a cable car up and walking back down through the gardens is the combination I would recommend, and you can get tickets for the cable car up Montjuic in advance.

Mirador de l’Alcalde, the Mayor’s Lookout, is the viewpoint to aim for on the way up. It looks over the harbour and the bulk of the city, and the mosaic underfoot is worth a look for what went into it: nuts, screws and other salvaged debris pressed into the paving.

Climbing Montjuic, up to the past

Climbing Montjuïc takes you through two world events stacked on one hill. The flat summit made Montjuïc the natural site for the city’s defences for three centuries, and the same flat top is what made it usable for an exposition and then an Olympic park. The sections below follow that order.

The 1929 International Exposition

The International Exposition of 1929 built most of what you now walk past on Montjuïc. As with every world fair, dozens of national pavilions went up, and while most were demolished afterwards, the survivors include a water feature, a mock-Spanish village, a Bauhaus pavilion and a set of museums and galleries that Barcelona still uses.

Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya

The Palau Nacional survived the demolitions because it was the fair’s central pavilion, and it now houses the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya. The MNAC holds the largest collection of Catalan art anywhere, covering more than a thousand years. Its Romanesque murals, lifted from Pyrenean churches, are what the museum is known for, and the collection also runs to Gothic art, modernist furniture by Antoni Gaudí, photography, and works by Dalí, Picasso and Ramon Casas.

If you like Dalí, our guide to the Dalí Museum in Figueres covers the other half of the trip.

The Palau Nacional is hard to miss, on Avinguda dels Montanyans at the top of the great staircase down to Plaça d’Espanya. General admission is €12 (about $14, £10), under-16s and over-65s go free, and the museum opens free to everyone on Saturdays from 15:00 and on the first Sunday of the month. If you only want the view, a €2 (about $2, £2) basic ticket gets you into the building and up to the rooftop viewpoint without the galleries.

Top tip: Avoid possible lines and get your ticket beforehand. It includes the audio guide and access to the rooftop viewpoint.

The Four Columns

The four Greek-style columns beside the MNAC are called exactly that, Les Quatre Columnes, and they stand for the four stripes of the Senyera, the Catalan flag. Josep Puig i Cadafalch designed them in 1919. They were pulled down before the 1929 Exposition under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, when Catalan symbols were being removed across the city, and the set standing there now is a reconstruction from 2010.

The Magic Fountain

The Font Màgica sits at the foot of the MNAC steps and puts on a free show of water, light and music after dark. Carles Buïgas designed the fountain for the 1929 Expo, and more than 3,000 people built it in under a year. The show is one of the most attended free attractions in Barcelona.

Show days and times change with the season, and they change more often than most guides admit. In the current summer season the fountain runs Wednesday to Sunday between 21:30 and 22:30, with two music-and-colour sessions inside that hour; the winter schedule drops to fewer evenings a week and an earlier start. Barcelona City Council publishes the current show times, and that is the page to check the week you go rather than any blog, this one included.

Coming up at dusk gets you two things at once: the fountain, and Barcelona’s sunset behind Tibidabo in the distance.

Poble Espanyol

Poble Espanyol is a village of 117 full-scale replica buildings, each copied from a different region of Spain, built for the 1929 fair to show off the country’s regional architecture in one place. Its streets hold craft shops and artisan workshops, wine cellars, a monastery, bars, cafés and a couple of nightclubs. It was meant to come down after the Exposition and stayed because people liked it.

Go in the afternoon. Not everything is open in the morning, and the workshops in particular start late. Entry costs around €14 (about $16, £12) for an adult booking online, a little more at the gate.

Top tip: Poble Espanyol is an attraction with an entry fee. You can get your ticket at the gate or you can buy a skip-the-line ticket online beforehand so that you can avoid possible lines. This ticket also includes an audiovisual show.

The Barcelona Pavilion

The Barcelona Pavilion is the low glass, marble and onyx building that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich designed as Germany’s pavilion for the 1929 Exposition. Its flat planes, open plan and expensive materials, including red onyx and travertine, made it one of the most copied buildings of the 20th century, and it is where the Barcelona Chair was first shown.

Unlike the Palau Nacional, the German pavilion did not survive the post-fair demolitions. It was rebuilt on its original site in the 1980s precisely because of how much later architecture had grown out of it.

Teatre Grec

The Teatre Grec is an open-air theatre cut into an old quarry on the Montjuïc hillside, built by the Catalan architect Ramon Reventós for the 1929 Exposition and modelled on a Greek amphitheatre. Gardens and woodland surround it, and it is still a working venue rather than a ruin to photograph.

Its main event is the Festival Grec de Barcelona, the city’s summer performing arts festival, which programmes theatre, music, dance and circus here and across the city.

The Museu d’Arqueologia de Catalunya

The Museu d’Arqueologia de Catalunya is the other 1929 survivor worth an hour, covering the prehistory and antiquity of Catalonia, the Iberian peninsula and the wider Mediterranean. Its main venue is the former Palace of Graphic Arts, another building the fair left behind.

The 1992 Summer Olympics

Montjuïc was the main stage of the 1992 Summer Olympics, the Games of the XXV Olympiad, and the second wave of building on the hill. The Games produced the Anella Olímpica, or Olympic Ring: the stadium, the Palau Sant Jordi, the Institut Nacional d’Educació Física de Catalunya, the swimming pools and Santiago Calatrava’s communications tower.

The Olympic Ring is worth walking through even if you go into none of it. The scale is enormous, the paving and water features are part of the design, and it is one of the quieter parts of Barcelona on a hot afternoon.

Olympic Stadium

The Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys was the centre of the ring and the venue for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1992 Games. It is open to the public and free to walk into on most days. The stadium is older than the Olympics it is famous for: it was built for the 1929 Exposition and opened that year.

Barcelona then bid to host the 1936 Olympics and lost to Berlin. An alternative People’s Olympiad was planned for the stadium in July 1936 and was cancelled when the Spanish Civil War broke out days before it was due to open. The stadium was rebuilt behind its original facade in the late 1980s for the 1992 Games. It has since served as FC Barcelona’s home ground during the Camp Nou redevelopment, and the arrangements have kept changing, so check the club’s fixture list rather than assuming either stadium.

Olympic museum

The Joan Antoni Samaranch Olympic and Sports Museum sits across the road from the stadium and tells the history of the Games through interactive exhibits and objects. It opened in 2007 and runs temporary exhibitions alongside the permanent displays, including a section on how sport has been played across different civilisations.

Montjuïc Communications Tower

Santiago Calatrava’s telecommunications tower is the white spike above the Olympic Ring, and it was built to carry broadcast coverage of the 1992 Games around the world. The tower stands 136 m (446 ft) tall and is shaped as an athlete holding up the Olympic flame. Its base is covered in trencadís, the broken-tile mosaic technique Gaudí made famous, and the whole structure doubles as a sundial.

Montjuïc Olympic swimming pools

The Piscina Municipal de Montjuïc is two pools, a diving pool and a swimming pool, with grandstand seating for several thousand people and a view straight over the city. This is the venue that hosted the Olympic diving, and it is one of the few places in Barcelona where you can swim with that view.

It opens to the public for the summer season only, roughly from late June to the end of August, and usually only the swimming pool rather than the diving pool. Entry has been around €7 (about $8, £6) for an adult in recent seasons, with a reduced rate for children, and Barcelona City Council’s sports department publishes the dates and prices each year. The pool also turns up in Kylie Minogue’s 2003 video for “Slow”, which was filmed here.

Palau Sant Jordi

The Palau Sant Jordi is the largest indoor arena in Spain, designed by the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki and completed in 1990 for the Games. Its curved roof was assembled at ground level and jacked into position, which is the detail engineers come to see. Today it works mainly as a concert and events venue, so the easiest way inside is to buy a ticket for whatever is on.

Montjuïc’s gardens

Montjuïc’s gardens are the reason to walk rather than ride, and there are enough of them to fill a morning. The hillside is terraced with public gardens all the way up, and the winding lanes between them are quieter and greener than anything in the city centre.

Two are worth going out of your way for. The Jardí Botànic de Barcelona, part of the Museu de Ciències Naturals, is laid out by region, with sections for Australia, the Canary Islands, South Africa, North Africa, Chile, California and the two ends of the Mediterranean. The current garden opened in 1999. Below it sits a separate and much older garden, the Jardí Botànic Històric, created in 1930 in two disused quarries, so if a guide credits the modern garden with a 1930 founding date it has merged the two.

The Jardins de Laribal are the prettiest, a set of terraces linked by stone staircases, statues and fountains, with water running down the steps in a design borrowed from the Alhambra in Granada. They sit next to the Miró Foundation and cover about 5 hectares (12 acres).

Montjuïc Cemetery

The Cementiri de Montjuïc, officially the Cementiri del Sud-Oest, climbs the seaward side of the hill above the Mediterranean and is one of the strangest sights in Barcelona. It opened in 1883 and is full of neo-Gothic mausoleums, ornate statuary and modernista tombs stacked in terraces up the slope.

Among the people buried here are Joan Miró, Isaac Albéniz, Ildefons Cerdà, Lluís Companys, Ramon Casas, Santiago Rusiñol and Joan Gamper, the founder of FC Barcelona. Entry is free and there is a signposted route through the main monuments.

Castell de Montjuïc

The Castell de Montjuïc is the fortress on the summit, and it is a city-run cultural site rather than the military museum older guides describe. Its foundation stone was laid in 1640, the old fort was demolished and rebuilt from 1751, and the castle took its present shape between 1779 and 1799. The Spanish state ran a military museum here from 1963; the castle passed to Barcelona City Council in 2007 and the museum closed in 2010.

Its history is the reason to go as much as the view. The castle was used as a prison and an execution site, and Lluís Companys, president of the Generalitat during the Spanish Civil War, was executed here in 1940, after the war had ended, on the orders of the Franco regime. The site now houses an interpretation centre and a memorial space covering that history.

Most visitors come for the 360-degree lookout over the city, the sea and the commercial port, which is the widest single viewpoint on the hill. The castle opens 10:00 to 20:00 from 1 March to 31 October and 10:00 to 18:00 from 1 November to 28 February, daily, closing only on 25 December and 1 January. Tickets can be bought online or at the gate, and buying ahead saves queueing in summer. Concerts, open-air cinema and other cultural events run inside the walls through the year.

Joan Miró museum

The Fundació Joan Miró is a modern art museum that Miró set up himself in 1975, and it holds the largest single collection of his work. Joan Miró was born in Barcelona and remains one of the city’s defining artists. His friend Josep Lluís Sert designed the building, a white, low, top-lit structure with an octagonal tower that is used for concerts, and the two of them wanted a place where young artists could experiment rather than a shrine.

The collection runs to roughly 14,000 pieces, including sculptures, paintings, tapestries, drawings and ceramics, plus a roof terrace, a sculpture garden and rooms given over to other artists. General admission is around €18 (about $21, £16), with reduced rates for students and over-65s.

Top tip: As Barcelona is such a popular destination, it can get quite busy at the museum. Avoid having to wait in line to get in by buying your skip-the-line ticket beforehand.

CaixaForum gallery

CaixaForum is the contemporary art centre at the bottom of the hill, housed in a modernista textile factory designed by Puig i Cadafalch, the same architect who drew the Four Columns. The red-brick mill was converted into galleries and now runs a rolling programme of exhibitions rather than a fixed collection, with works by artists including Anish Kapoor and Tony Cragg passing through.

The conversion is half the attraction. Arata Isozaki, who designed the Palau Sant Jordi, added the glass entrance canopy and the sunken patio, and the old rooftop terrace is open with views back across Plaça d’Espanya.

Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món

The ethnology museum on Passeig de Santa Madrona is Montjuïc’s least-visited good museum, set in a hexagonal 1970s building on the way up the hill. Its three floors deal with heritage, ethnology and how cultures see themselves and each other, with a permanent exhibition on what human lives have in common as much as what separates them.

One floor is given to temporary exhibitions, and the permanent displays cover Catalan heritage in particular, from traditional dances to historic dress. The museum shares its name and its collections with a second site in the Born, so check which address an exhibition is at before you set off.

Want more things to do in Barcelona? See the Barcelona itineraries I put together, and our wider Spain guides.

Plan your trip to Barcelona

These are the booking sites I use myself for trips like this one, chosen for range and price rather than for the commission. Each one covers a different part of the trip.

Where to stay in Barcelona. Poble-sec and Sant Antoni are the neighbourhoods to look at if you want to be within walking distance of Montjuïc without paying Eixample prices. Compare hotels and apartments across the city on Booking.com, which has the filters to sort by distance, price and the things that matter, and a loyalty programme that discounts once you have booked a few times.

Booking your flight to Barcelona. Trip.com compares fares across airlines and has a price alert worth setting a few weeks out.

Renting a car in Barcelona. You do not need a car in the city, and parking near Montjuïc is difficult. If you are heading out to Girona, Figueres or the Costa Brava for a day or two, DiscoverCars compares hundreds of rental companies on one search.

Tours, tickets and activities in Barcelona. GetYourGuide covers everything from day trips to the skip-the-line tickets for the museums above, and the cable car ticket is on there too.

Don’t forget travel insurance

Travel insurance covers the things planning cannot. A booking falls through, you break a leg on a Montjuïc staircase, or you drop the camera you bought for the trip, and the policy is what stands between that and the bill.

I have carried ongoing travel insurance since I started travelling, so every trip is covered without my having to think about it. If you only travel a few times a year, insuring each trip separately works out cheaper. Check out SafetyWing if you do not have cover yet. Their plans are flexible enough to start after you have already left, they were the first travel insurer to cover COVID, and when I caught it they reimbursed my expenses without an argument.

WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips

The 5 tips below come from walking the hill and from re-checking Montjuïc’s tickets, timetables and cable cars against the city council’s own pages, and each one fixes something older guides still get wrong.

1. Check which cable car your ticket is for before you set off. Two separate systems serve the hill: the Telefèric de Montjuïc covers the 750 m from the top of the funicular to the castle, and the Transbordador Aeri del Port crosses from Barceloneta to Miramar. Buying a ticket for one and turning up at the other is a well-known trap here, so start from the beach for the Transbordador and from Plaça d’Espanya or Paral·lel for the funicular and Telefèric.
2. Go to the MNAC on a Saturday after 15:00 or on the first Sunday of the month. Entry is free to everyone at those times, against €12 the rest of the week, and under-16s and over-65s never pay. If it is only the view over Plaça d’Espanya you want, the €2 basic ticket takes you up to the rooftop without the galleries.
3. Look up the Magic Fountain times the week you travel, not before. The season shifts, and the current summer schedule runs Wednesday to Sunday between 21:30 and 22:30 with two sessions inside that hour, while winter drops to fewer nights and an earlier start. Barcelona City Council’s own show-times page is the only version worth trusting.
4. Do not climb to the castle expecting a military museum. The Spanish army’s museum there closed in 2010, three years after the castle passed to the city, and what stands now is a municipal cultural site with an interpretation centre and a memorial space. The ramparts and the views over the port are the reason to go up.
5. Work out which botanical garden you are aiming for. The Jardí Botànic de Barcelona opened in 1999 and is laid out by world region, while the Jardí Botànic Històric below it is a much smaller garden made in 1930 out of two disused quarries. Guides that give the modern garden a 1930 founding date have quietly merged two different places.

About the author. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and the first-hand notes in this post come from her walk up Montjuïc through the gardens to the castle. The team covers Barcelona and Spain for independent travellers, including the museum tickets, cable car rides, hotels and day trips worth booking, and updates this page when prices, opening hours and show times change.