Torre Glòries — skyscraper
Fred Romero · CC BY 2.0

Torre Glòries

  • 1 min read
  • 41.403° N 2.190° E

Interesting facts

  • The tower is built as two concentric concrete cylinders that never touch; the inner core holds the lifts and stairs, the outer shell is pierced by about 4,500 windows.
  • More than 4,500 independently controlled LED fixtures on the facade can produce around 16 million colours, in a lighting scheme designed by Yann Kersalé.
  • Since 2006 the Catalan broadcaster TV3 has used the tower's illuminated facade as the backdrop for its New Year's Eve countdown.
  • Jean Nouvel designed the north side of the tower to frame an optimal view of the Sagrada Família, and cited its bell towers as an influence.
  • Standing about 144 metres high with 38 storeys, four of them underground, it was for years the third-tallest building in Barcelona.
  • The French urban climber Alain Robert has scaled the tower's facade four times, in 2006, 2007, 2016 and 2020.
  • Locals gave the bullet-shaped tower irreverent nicknames such as el supositori, the suppository, and l'obús, the artillery shell.
  • Construction took nearly six years, from site works in 1999 to completion in 2004, and involved roughly 1,170 workers.
  • King Juan Carlos I formally inaugurated the tower on 16 September 2005, a few months after its first occupants moved in.
  • The dome at the top holds Cloud Cities Barcelona, an immersive installation by the Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno, his only permanent work in Europe.

Why it is worth it

Before it had the name it carries now, this tower belonged entirely to a water utility. Aigües de Barcelona commissioned it as a new headquarters, and the French architect Jean Nouvel gave the company something that looked less like an office block than a geological event — a rounded, tapering form he described as evoking a geyser bursting up through Barcelona's grid. He borrowed the idea of a shimmering, broken-up surface directly from Antoni Gaudí's ceramic trencadís mosaics elsewhere in the city, and the tower's silhouette was meant to echo the jagged outline of Montserrat, the mountain that dominates views inland from Barcelona.

The skin is the real engineering story. Roughly four and a half thousand aluminium panels, finished in around forty different colours, sit under a second, independent layer of glass louvres that can tilt open or closed. The louvres aren't decorative shading — they're a working bioclimatic system, adjusting to cut solar heat gain on the building's sunniest faces while letting the panels underneath catch and scatter light differently depending on the angle you're viewing from, which is why the tower reads as a different colour gradient depending on the time of day and where you're standing.

The building spent its first name, Torre Agbar, as an acronym of its original water-company owner. That changed in 2017, when the real-estate group Merlin Properties bought the tower and renamed it after Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes, the square at its base — a rebrand that had nothing to do with Nouvel's design and everything to do with the building outliving the single company it was built for.

Getting there

Located in el Clot. Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport (BCN) is about 15 km away.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Barcelona 16The Most Beautiful Places in Catalonia 26The Most Beautiful Places in Spain 150The Most Beautiful Buildings in Catalonia 7The Most Striking Modern Skyscrapers 13The Most Beautiful Buildings in Spain 18The Most Striking Skyscrapers 20The Most Beautiful Modern Buildings 50The Most Beautiful Buildings 286

From the encyclopaedia

The Torre Glòries, formerly known as Torre Agbar, is a 38-story skyscraper located between Avinguda Diagonal and Carrer Badajoz, near Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes, which marks the gateway to the new technological district of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It was designed by French architect Jean Nouvel in association with the Spanish firm b720 Fermín Vázquez Arquitectos and built by Dragados. The Torre Glòries is located in the Poblenou neighbourhood of Barcelona and it was originally named after its owners, the Agbar Group, a holding company whose interests include the Barcelona water company Aigües de Barcelona.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

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