Breathtaking and fresh views of Barcelona from new Torre Glòries observation deck

 

The Torre Glòries has been a fixture in the Barcelona skyline since the tower was erected in 2005. 

Until now, its visual offering to the Catalan capital has primarily been from the outside looking up, but on Friday, May 20, a permanent new viewpoint will open to the public allowing anybody to experience Barcelona in a whole new way. 

Located on the 30th floor of the building, the 360​° viewpoint lets people gaze upon the city from a height of 125m. The viewpoint will be known as Mirador Torre Glòries, as “mirador” is the Catalan word for “viewpoint.”

Not only will Mirador Torre Glòries offer breathtaking sights of the Catalan capital but it will also include a multidisciplinary space combining art, science, and technology, as well as a walkable art installation ‘Cloud Cities Barcelona’ by contemporary artist Tomás Saraceno.

Tickets are available already from the Mirador Torre Glòries website, with Friday, May 20 being the first day that people can go. Entry starts at €15. 

“Hyperview” combining music, art, and technology

In all, visitors will enjoy three different sections on a trip to the Mirador Torre Glòries: the 'Hipermirador', the Viewpoint, and the Cloud Cities Barcelona installation. 

The experience begins on floor -1 of the tower at the Hipermirador (“Hyperview” as it will be known in English). Here, the public will learn about an alternative side to Barcelona through different installations taking the real-time pulse of the city, using big data infrastructures and technologies. The five installations combine art, music, and technology to produce large-scale audiovisual productions. 

The installations invite visitors to reflect on the future of cities in the context of the changing environment and the interdependence and interconnection that exists between all elements that make up the urban ecosystem.

Powered by data collected from across the city in a wide range of contexts, such as air quality, pollen count, wind direction and strength, temperature and acidification of the sea, the tweets sent from the city, traffic, noise levels picked up from spots such as Barceloneta beach, Collserola Park, the Llobregat delta, and from sounds within the city center. 

Among the artistic offerings in this section are a prologue of unconnected phrases united by the theme of Barcelona as a city, a set of 132 paper sculptures representing different figures of Barcelona created by artist Joan Sallas, and a 108m2 projection of mostly real-time automatically generated streams of the sea, mountains, data about the wind, and sounds picked up from sensors across the city.

Accompanying visitors throughout their visit is music generated by John Talabot and Maria Arnal, two of the most prominent musicians working in Barcelona today. Using algorithms, the music that plays in the exhibition space is created afresh every day, based on the conditions of the city on that day – a live soundtrack that changes according to the moods and states of the city, depending on weather conditions, the phase of the moon cycle, and traffic. 

Mediapro Exhibitions

The Mirador Torre Glòries project was born in 2017 when MERLIN Properties, owner of Torre Glòries, asked Mediapro Exhibitions to develop a viewpoint that would open the exceptional views of the building to the public. 

From the outset, Mediapro Exhibitions wanted to create an innovative project that offered a unique and different experience, with the aim of making it a place of reflection, and one of the most interesting parts of the city of Barcelona as well as a worldwide reference for such projects.