Barcelona 1992’s trail of bronze

Barcelona 1992’s trail of bronze

by Valerii Sazonov in Barcelona

A trail originally established to highlight the history of Barcelona during the 1992 Olympics has been brought to life again by a new mobile “app” enabling visitors to discover a series of commemorative plaques across the city.

Plaques were installed as part of the Barcelona 92 Cultural Olympiad Senyalització Històrica project and which now shines gold.

On May 9, 1991, a plaque appeared on the façade of Casa Lleó Morera, the first of its kind. This building, an integral part of Barcelona’s famous “Block of Discord,” is a masterpiece of Catalan Modernisme from the early 20th century. It had suffered decades of neglect, yet what remains still amazes tourists. The plaque identifies the man behind the building:“Architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner,” the bronze lettering of the plaque declares. Below, on the left, there is an inscription “Olimpíada Cultural, Barcelona’92” and in the right corner stands the emblem of the Barcelona 1992 Olympics.

The scale of Barcelona’s Cultural Olympiad was unprecedented. “We will do more and better than anyone else, we will hold a four-year Cultural Olympiad,” they had promised. This bold statement in the bid documents was more than just bravado.

The committee threw itself into their work with enthusiasm, though it did not always have the necessary resources. They could not avoid the problems that came with such ambition. Not all of the projects in the four-year plan were completed; some changed in duration and scope, while others overlapped.

The city’s architectural heritage was at the heart of several initiatives. The most famous was surely “El Quadrat d’Or,” focused on Modernista heritage, featuring a series of exhibitions, book presentations, guided tours through the “Golden Square” of the Eixample district, and light installations. The impact of El Quadrat d’Or is hard to overestimate — it was then that Barcelona rose to become one of the world’s leading tourist destinations. But the project that left a mark still visible in the city today, in the form of a series of bronze plaques on singular buildings, had a less flashy and more practical name: Senyalització Històrica.

The plaques were the brainchild of the late Lluís Permanyer who died only last month at the age of 86. He was the author of more than 60 books about the city and considered one of the most respected chroniclers of Barcelona’s history. By the late 1980s, he was a columnist at La Vanguardia, a prominent newspaper. He had previously reported international news. Permanyer insisted that Barcelona was then a very different city, one that was just beginning its transformation.

It was Permanyer who proposed the installation of informative plaques. He pointed to London as an example as they have a similar network known as “Blue Plaques.”

Maria Aurèlia Capmany, a writer and city councilor responsible for culture, liked the idea but pleaded lack of funds. At that time not every house even had a street name sign.

Capmany advised Permanyer to take the proposal to the Cultural Olympiad’s management team. There he found a supporter in Josep “Pep” Subirós, the leader of the programme.

When the working group gathered in 1989, it was decided to divide the project into three thematic blocks — buildings, people, and events each to be marked with 150 plaques, 450 in total.

Permanyer was to be responsible for those which commemorated events, journalist and historian Josep Maria Huertas for people, and Josep Maria Carandell, a writer and art critic, for architectural heritage. The group agreed to start with architecture, the section entrusted to Carandell.

To design the plaque, Subirós chose André Ricard the industrial designer who had created the 1992 Olympic Torch to design the plaque. There had been no competition. For his part, Permanyer believes this decision proved fatal for the project.

The square by the Antiga Masia de Can Trilla appears rather neglected. At its centre stands a cast-iron fountain with four lanterns. There is nothing else in the square that is remarkable. Above the low doorway of Can Trilla hangs a crucifix, and to the right, the bronze plaque is covered with graffiti. Permanyer helped Carandell arrive at the criteria for selecting buildings: while the aim of El Quadrat d’Or was to showcase Catalan modernism in all its splendour, Senyalització Històrica was about straightforward information, requiring that something significant, if not artistic, then historical, should be found in each neighbourhood.

An early 18th-century farmhouse, later used by a religious community, became such a site for Gràcia. Still, Permanyer reminds us, the project did not achieve its original goals.

Ricard’s large bronze plaques, 40cm × 42 cm, produced in collaboration with the graphic designer Yves Zimmermann, looked striking but proved hard to read.

In addition, their partially hand-crafted execution, turned out to be far more expensive than expected. During the design process costs increased and eventually each plaque cost around 75,000 pesetas (about €1,200 in 2025). As the cost grew, the projected number of plaques to be produced was reduced. The initial 450 were soon reduced to 180, then 150. In notes about the launch — the installation at Casa Lleó Morera — only 70 plaques were expected for the first phase. The project was cut short abruptly and prematurely.

The “Casa del Doctor Genové” stands out even by Barcelona standards. Its emphatically vertical Modernista façade, with strong Neo-Gothic influences and blue-and-gold mosaics seem made for the pages of a book on alchemy. On the entrance arch, to the right, one can still see some marks — a darkened square with four holes.

To reconstruct the trail Senyalització Històrica, it is necessary to follow such traces: how many plaques were actually made, and where they were installed?

The accounts bring some clarity, the eight documented orders at Vilagrasa, the company which manufactured them, confirm that between February and July 1991, only 61 plaques were produced.

Not all of them were installed. Permanyer recalls the difficulties of obtaining permission and the fact that not all buildings were suitable for such installations.

What is more, some of the landmarks including Palau del Baró de Quadras, Casa de les

Punxes, Teatre del Liceu, had also been chosen for the Generalitat’s (regional government) “Bé d’Interès Cultural” (BIC) initiative which was designed to highlight their legal protection, so tensions emerged.

In a later note, one of the project managers asked for the postponement of installation at several buildings, even though permission had been granted and plaques made ready, because the buildings were subject to the BIC. These plaques were never installed.

Further came with later renovations. While the disappearance of the plaque from Casa del Doctor Genové remains unclear, the plaque on Casa Francesc Piña on La Rambla was removed during 2009 alterations and never returned, a lamp now occupies its place.

Bloc Diagonal, another of Carandell’s less obvious choices, takes us out of the city centre. The building is currently under renovation, but the construction company has confirmed that the plaque has been preserved and will be put back.

50 plaques produced for the first phase of the Senyalització Històrica project of the 1992 Cultural Olympiad can still be found on some of the most famous buildings in Barcelona. The plaque from “Bloc Diagonal” is currently in storage as the building is under renovation.

Where façades are maintained, the dynamic human figure by Josep Maria Trias and the Olympic rings gleam golden, though it is true they can only be discerned up close, lending weight to Permanyer’s criticism.

Yet in one respect Ricard’s design fully meets the brief. It “ages well.” The slightly mannered design of the Senyalització Històrica plaques, and the need to know where to look, invites the visitor to explore Barcelona through one of the most intriguing projects of the Cultural Olympiad — a route that has itself become part of the Olympic heritage.

The house at Cometa Street, 4, in the very heart of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, is remarkable for little, except that the Catalan composer Enric Morera was born there. A bronze plaque tells us so, the only plaque of the second phase of Senyalització Històrica which has so far been identified.

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