Montjuïc Barcelona: what to see, the castle and how to get up the hill

Montjuïc Castle

The fortress standing today dates from 1751-1779, the work of military engineer Juan Martín Cermeño on top of an earlier 1640 fort. You walk the moat, the bastions and the upper rampart, which looks out over the container port, the Llobregat delta and the whole city. Inside, a permanent exhibition tells the story straight: the guns here shelled Barcelona in 1842, and President Lluís Companys was executed in the moat on 15 October 1940. The city council only regained the site in 2007. Ticket: €12 general and €8 reduced per ajuntament.barcelona.cat, free for under-16s, every Sunday from 15:00 and all day on the first Sunday of the month. Time: an unhurried hour and a half. Verdict: essential, more for what it tells you than for what it displays.

MNAC, inside the Palau Nacional

The 1929 Exposition palace holds the world's finest collection of Romanesque mural painting: entire apses stripped from Pyrenean churches between 1919 and 1923 to stop them being sold to foreign collectors, with the Christ Pantocrator of Sant Climent de Taüll as the centrepiece. Upstairs there is Gothic, Renaissance, Modernisme and a Gaudí room. The trick: per museunacional.cat, the basic ticket of €2 covers the building and the roof terraces; the €12 general ticket includes the collection and the terraces and is valid for two days within a month. Time: a good two hours for the Romanesque alone. Closed Mondays. More context in our guide to Barcelona museums.

Fundació Joan Miró

Miró set the foundation up in his own lifetime and commissioned the building from his friend Josep Lluís Sert, who finished it in 1975: white vaults, curved skylights and courtyards that pull Mediterranean light into the galleries. You get paintings, sculptures, tapestries and Alexander Calder's Mercury Fountain, rescued from the 1937 Paris Exposition. Ticket: €17 online and €18 at the desk, €11 reduced and free for under-12s, per fmirobcn.org. Time: an hour and a half. Verdict: one of the few museums where the container explains the contents.

Poble Espanyol

117 buildings reproducing streets, squares and monuments from across Spain, put up in 1929 after a research trip round the peninsula. It works as a real village today: craft workshops you can walk into — glassblowing, leather, jewellery — the Fran Daurel museum, restaurants and a concert venue. Ticket: per poble-espanyol.com, €14.40 booked in advance online and €16 at the gate; €9/€10 for children aged 4-12 and free under 4. Time: two and a half hours. Verdict: with children or an interest in craft, it works very well; if you want authentic monuments, know what you are buying. You can book the skip-the-line ticket or the combined ticket with a Montjuïc audio tour.

Mies van der Rohe Pavilion

The 1929 German Pavilion, by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich, was dismantled in 1930 and existed only in photographs for fifty years; between 1983 and 1986 it was rebuilt on its original plot by Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Cristian Cirici and Fernando Ramos. It is a travertine platform with planes of onyx, green marble and glass, a pool holding Georg Kolbe's Alba, and at its centre the Barcelona Chair, designed by Mies and Reich so that King Alfonso XIII could preside over the opening. Ticket: €9 general and €5 reduced, free for under-16s and on the first Sunday of the month, per miesbcn.com. Time: half an hour. Book the ticket with audio guide if you want to understand what you are looking at.

CaixaForum and the Casaramona factory

The former Casaramona textile mill, completed in 1911 by Josep Puig i Cadafalch, is industrial Modernisme in bare brick: open-plan halls, water towers and not a single chimney, because the power was electric. It spent decades as a mounted-police barracks and reopened as a cultural centre in 2002, programming large temporary exhibitions. Ticket: €6 general per caixaforum.org, open daily 10:00-20:00.

The Olympic Ring

The Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys was built for the 1929 Exposition to a design by Pere Domènech i Roura, then gutted and rebuilt inside for 1992 while keeping the original façade. Beside it stands Arata Isozaki's Palau Sant Jordi (1990), whose roof was assembled at ground level and jacked into place, and Santiago Calatrava's white communications tower, tilted at 19.5° and conceived as a sundial casting its shadow across Plaça d'Europa. The Bernat Picornell pools and the Joan Antoni Samaranch Olympic and Sports Museum (€6.30 general, €3.90 students) complete the set. Verdict: the walk round the outside is free and gives you the full measure of what 1992 meant here.

Gardens: Costa i Llobera, the Botanical and the rest

Montjuïc has more garden than museum. The Jardins de Costa i Llobera, on the seaward slope, hold one of Europe's largest collections of cacti and succulents, several metres tall against the backdrop of the port: free, and almost always empty. The Jardí Botànic, next to the stadium, arranges the flora of the world's five Mediterranean climate zones by continent; it costs €3.50 and is free on Sundays from 15:00 and all day on the first Sunday of the month. On the northern slope you have the Jardins de Laribal with the Font del Gat, the Mossèn Cinto Verdaguer gardens (bulbs and water lilies, at their best in March and April) and the Joan Brossa gardens, all free. If that is your thing, see our guide to squares and parks.

Magic Fountain and cemetery

At the foot of the staircase, Carles Buïgas's Magic Fountain has been running since 1929 and puts on a free water, light and music show in season, on a calendar that shifts and with cancellations for wind or drought: check days and times on our Magic Fountain page before you build an evening around it. And on the southern slope, Montjuïc Cemetery (1883) is an open-air museum of Modernista mausoleums holding Europe's only collection of funeral carriages; entry is free from 8:00 to 18:00, with QR codes explaining the monuments in four languages.

A full day, from Plaça d'Espanya to the castle

• 9:30 · Plaça d'Espanya. Start at the bottom, with Ramon Reventós's Venetian towers framing the avenue. Ten minutes.
• 9:45 · CaixaForum. Cross to the left: the Casaramona factory opens at 10:00 and is empty at that hour. One hour.
• 11:00 · Mies van der Rohe Pavilion. Literally opposite. A long half-hour, and don't leave without walking round the rear pool.
• 11:45 · MNAC. Take the escalators up. Romanesque first, roof terraces afterwards with the city in front of you. Two and a half hours.
• 14:15 · Lunch. The MNAC's own café-restaurant under the dome, or walk down into Poble-sec in twenty minutes for neighbourhood prices.
• 15:30 · Fundació Miró or Poble Espanyol, depending on the group. With children, Poble Espanyol without hesitating. Two hours.
• 17:30 · Cable car to the castle. From Avinguda Miramar. Eight minutes with the harbour underneath you.
• 18:00 · Montjuïc Castle. Rampart walk, exhibition and the last good light on the sea. An hour and a half.
• 19:45 · Walk down through the Miramar and Laribal gardens, or take the cable car back if your legs have had enough. If it is Magic Fountain season, finish with the show at the bottom.

Half a day: four hours well spent

Pick one block rather than half of each. Upper block (transport and views): metro to Paral·lel, funicular, cable car, castle, then walk down through the Laribal gardens into Poble-sec. Four hours flat, with almost all the spending on the cable car. Lower block (1929): metro to Espanya, CaixaForum, the Mies Pavilion, the MNAC with its terraces and, if there is room, Poble Espanyol. Same time, no hills at all thanks to the escalators.

On a tight budget: funicular on your T-casual, Jardins de Costa i Llobera, the Mirador de l'Alcalde, the €2 basic MNAC ticket for the terraces, and walk down through the gardens. A full day on the hill for the price of two metro rides and a coffee. Other panoramas compared in our guide to Barcelona viewpoints.

Where "Montjuïc" comes from. There are two explanations and it is worth knowing both. The first derives it from the Latin Mons Iovis, "mount of Jupiter", assuming a Roman temple on the summit that has never been located. The second reads it as "mount of the Jews", after the medieval Jewish cemetery documented on the slope from the 11th century, from which more than seven hundred graves and headstones with Hebrew inscriptions have been recovered. The medieval forms of the name — Montjuich, Mont dels jueus — point mainly to the second, which is now the majority reading among historians, though the first still turns up in guidebooks. Neither is proved beyond doubt: anyone selling you one as settled is selling you something.

1929: the hill invented in two years. Montjuïc was quarry, allotments and shacks until the 1929 International Exposition urbanised the whole of it. That operation produced the Palau Nacional (Eugenio Cendoya, Enric Catà and Pere Domènech i Roura), Poble Espanyol — conceived by Josep Puig i Cadafalch and carried out by Francesc Folguera, Ramon Reventós, Xavier Nogués and Miquel Utrillo — Carles Buïgas's Magic Fountain, the Venetian towers, the stadium, and the terraced garden system of Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier and Nicolau Maria Rubió i Tudurí. And the German Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe, which stood for eight months, was demolished in 1930, and became — in photographs alone — one of the most influential buildings of the 20th century long before anyone thought of rebuilding it.

1992: the hill reinvented. Sixty years later, the Olympic Games put the focus back up here. The 1929 stadium was kept on the outside and rebuilt within; Arata Isozaki raised the Palau Sant Jordi; Calatrava planted his white tower; and the city used the moment to open up its seafront and build its ring roads. What you walk through today is really three layers stacked on each other: a military fortress that pointed its guns at the city, a world's fair that wanted to show the city off, and a Games that rebuilt it. Montjuïc is far better once you see that — every building belongs to a different idea of what Barcelona was supposed to be.