Barceloneta Beach

Thirty-five years ago, this beach didn't exist. The entire Barceloneta waterfront was an industrial wasteland of railway sidings, derelict warehouses, and factories that had turned their backs on the sea. Barcelona was a major Mediterranean city that had essentially walled itself off from its own coastline. Then the city won the bid for the 1992 Olympics, and everything changed overnight.

The Olympic transformation created a two-mile strip of beach where there had been none. The Passeig Maritim was laid out with bars, restaurants, and Frank Gehry's shimmering "Peix d'Or" sculpture — a 52-metre golden fish — at the Port Olympic end. It was the single most dramatic piece of urban renewal in Barcelona's modern history, and it turned a working-class fishing neighborhood into one of the city's most desirable postcodes.

But Barceloneta itself is much older than its beach. The neighborhood was built in the mid-eighteenth century for residents displaced when King Philip V demolished the Ribera quarter to build the military fortress of the Ciutadella after the War of 1714. Military engineer Juan Martin Cermeno designed the area on a grid of narrow streets with uniform low-rise buildings. The triangular neighborhood still has that compact, village-like feel — laundry strung between balconies, old men playing dominoes on the Placa de la Barceloneta.

Rebecca Horn's rusting steel sculpture "Homenatge a la Barceloneta" stands on the sand like a monument to the old chiringuitos — the beach shacks that were cleared away during the Olympic cleanup. It's a memorial to what was lost as much as a marker of what was gained.