The future Sagrera Station, Barcelona’s promised magnificent railway station, recently completed fifteen years of construction. Her neighbors have already resigned themselves to living with cranes and the noise of trucks. And also waiting for the administrations, which are always hesitant to specify dates, to give them a horizon to complete the infrastructure. Well, this week they learned the closest thing to a deadline: the inauguration won’t happen until 2031, or certainly 2032.
Barcelona will then begin to close one of its largest urban scars, the one that separates the areas of Sant Andreu and Sant Martí with a railway network that will be permanently buried and with an intermodal station that will be, along with Atocha, in Madrid, the busiest in Spain. It is expected to accommodate 100 million passengers annually, including users of high-speed buses, rodalis, metro, intercity and urban buses.
If the station’s completion date is met, it will mean a total of 22 years in the works, plus three decades since the project’s completion, when Jordi Pujol was still president and the popular Francisco Álvarez Cascos was in the Ministry of Public Works. “We live with the struggling neighborhood, and the feeling is that we see it further and further away,” says Oliger Méndez, of the Sagrera Neighborhood Association’s board of directors. “It is never anyone’s fault for delay, but everyone’s suffering,” he says.
The deadline for equipping the station was set by Joan Balta, director of Barcelona Sagrera Alta Velocitat (BSAV), the joint company owned by Adif, Renfe, the city council and Generitat responsible not only for the construction of the facility, but also for promoting the urban transformation of the entire surrounding area. Besides the railway works, it is planned to build 13,000 homes in this sector of the city – 43% of which are protected – as well as hotels, offices, equipment and a wide green corridor covering the railway line.
Currently, the station project, which will involve an investment of about $350 million, is awaiting approval, so that the bidding process for the works will be carried out throughout 2026, and work could begin around 2027. “It is a huge architectural work with very detailed facilities, and what the technicians say is that it is impossible to implement in less than five years,” Balta explains.
Since resuming work in 2018 after a four-year break, “technically it has developed as much as it should,” says BSAV’s General Manager. “With twice the number of teams, things could have gone faster? There is no denying that it has been a little faster, but in no time has it stopped and building certification levels are high.” “There was no economic strangulation on the part of Adiv,” Balta responds.
The building that will form the station will have to be erected with trains passing through its structure, as the railway works that have concentrated the work so far will be closed in advance. Since last March, high-speed trains have been running on the line heading to France under its cover, which is 80% complete, according to Adif. Four of the ten tracks also operate in the Train Technician Treatment Zone (ZTTT), a logistics node that will improve traffic in the city.
With an investment of $1,270 million, the Sagrera railway section will be fully operational in 2026, Adiv said, but after that the station will have to be built for passengers. Another novelty that will arrive before the station’s ribbon cutting is access to the subway. The L4, L9 and L10 stations of Sagrera-TAV will stop in 2027, according to the deadlines set by the Generalitat in this case.
Delays and cost overruns hinder business
At the same time, residents question the goals, which have been reconsidered several times in recent decades. They also denounce the invalidity of the dialogue about the project with Adif or the city council. When consulted by this newspaper, both declined to make any assessments.
Oleger Mendes, a resident of La Sagrera for 50 years, witnessed the citizen’s demand to build a park over the historic railway pit that used to be this area, and follows the events with ambivalence. On the one hand, it is aware of the difficulties of the Pharaonic project, which is the most important railway project in Spain in years, and which also includes new buildable areas in which about 30,000 Barcelona residents will live. But on the other hand, it blames those responsible for the delays and accumulated pauses in its progress.
Between 2014 and 2018 there was no movement in La Sagrera. The economic crisis caused a decline in investment. “Minister Montoro’s obsession was to cut off funding to Catalonia through this process,” Menéndez says. Balta confirms something similar: “With the change of government (the People’s Party), it was good for them that business stopped.”
But disinvestment was not the only burden the business suffered. In those years, irregularities and cost overruns became known in the works, which ended in the arrest of senior Adif officials, and this also contributed to slowing down its progress. The Public Prosecutor’s Office accused them of inflating expenses until they caused the transfer of 82 million euros. But a judge finally concluded in 2019 that these additional costs were due to the urgent need to meet deadlines to deliver the works.
The city surrounding the station
The Sagrera area, along with the free trade zone, is the main growth area on which the Barcelona City Council is pinning its hopes for building public housing. In this area as well, delays have accumulated for years. But at the same time, completed developments with new tenants are starting to become a reality.
Barcelona City Council plans to build a total of 13,524 apartments as part of the urban transformation, where around 30,000 new residents will live. Of this, 43% will be at a protected rate (VPO or endowment) and the rest will be in the free market. Currently, a total of 3,868 buildings are considered under construction, while 633 buildings are under construction.
The new neighborhoods will rise on each side of a linear park approximately 4 kilometers long that will stitch the neighborhoods of Sant Martí de Provençal, Sant Andreu, La Vernida, and El Clote above the roads. One of the most anticipated and recently announced projects is the Primm area, in the area between Pont del Tribal Digne, Santander, Cantabria and Rambla Primm streets. In total, there will be 3,360 houses, of which about 2,000 will be the property of the municipality and endowments for young people and the elderly.
But this will also take a long time. Demolition of the current warehouses is expected to begin in 2027 and residential work to begin in 2029.
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