Nou Barris
Nou Barris: thirteen peripheral neighbourhoods of estates, self-building and struggles for basic services.
Created as a district to give political visibility to northern popular neighbourhoods, Nou Barris holds cases barates (Can Peguera), self-built hills (Roquetes, Torre Baró), crisis estates (Ciutat Meridiana) and residual agriculture (Vallbona). It is essential to any honest atlas of Barcelona. The district groups 13 neighbourhoods with a combined registered population of about 183,280 (padró 2026). The comparative table uses the same definitions and years for every barri. Internal inequalities — income, density, tourism, self-built or Eixample histories — are best read neighbourhood by neighbourhood. Each has its own page with sources.
Neighbourhood directory
| Neighbourhood | Population | Density | Mean disposable income of census sections |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vilapicina i la Torre Llobeta | 26,478 | 469.5 | 22,272 |
| Porta | 31,199 | 372.7 | 20,201 |
| el Turó de la Peira | 17,378 | 490.9 | 17,500 |
| Can Peguera | 2,122 | 178.3 | 15,994 |
| la Guineueta | 15,624 | 255.3 | 22,188 |
| Canyelles | 6,906 | 87.4 | 21,187 |
| les Roquetes | 17,595 | 273.6 | 15,717 |
| Verdun | 13,507 | 569.9 | 16,925 |
| la Prosperitat | 28,174 | 476.7 | 18,709 |
| la Trinitat Nova | 8,128 | 140.9 | 15,295 |
| Torre Baró | 3,236 | 18.6 | 14,872 |
| Ciutat Meridiana | 11,493 | 304.9 | 13,355 |
| Vallbona | 1,440 | 23.5 | 15,483 |
- Vilapicina i la Torre Llobeta — Vilapicina i la Torre Llobeta joins a village name documented since the tenth century with the housing estate that grew from 1948 around a late-medieval manor, and its northern edge is Passeig de Fabra i Puig.
- Porta — Porta takes its name from Can Porta, a lost farmhouse, and in a century it went from fields around two farmhouses to Plaça de Sóller, the blocks of the 1960s and the large parks of the south.
- el Turó de la Peira — El Turó de la Peira grows around a pine-covered hill that became a public park in 1936 and was partly taken over by the blocks of the 1950s and 1960s; the collapse of a building on Carrer del Cadí in 1990 made it one of the Barcelona neighbourhoods most affected by aluminosis.
- Can Peguera — Can Peguera is, according to the City Council, the last living example of Barcelona's cases barates (“low-cost houses”): about 650 single-storey houses built between 1929 and 1932 to rehouse workers from the Montjuïc shacks, saved from the demolition planned since 1976 by a change of planning in 2015.
- la Guineueta — La Guineueta takes its name from a vanished farmhouse, Can Guineueta; it was built in the 1960s in two zones divided by Passeig de Valldaura, and residents won the Parc de la Guineueta in 1971, while the Parc Central de Nou Barris grew on the grounds of the old mental hospital.
- Canyelles — Canyelles is a housing estate of about 65 blocks and towers, inaugurated in 1978 in Nou Barris on the site of the shantytown of la Guineueta Vella; a neighbours' campaign won its former residents a new home there.
- les Roquetes — Les Roquetes is a hillside neighbourhood that its own residents helped to build: in the 1950s they put up houses on land with no services, in 1963 they paid for electricity in the streets, and in 1964 they dug the sewers themselves, on Sundays.
- Verdun — Verdun is a triangle of 23.7 hectares that grew from the Cases del Governador of 1952, put up in haste to rehouse shack-dwellers, and it is still arguing over its name: Verdun, for a First World War battle, or Verdum, for a bird.
- la Prosperitat — La Prosperitat is a dense neighbourhood of 59 hectares that grew from 1957 with migration, apartment blocks and few facilities, and won what it lacked square by square: the first square in 1976, plaça d'Àngel Pestaña in 1986, the Casal de Barri in 1988.
- la Trinitat Nova — La Trinitat Nova began in the 1950s as a public-housing estate on farmland at the edge of Barcelona, and since 2001 its blocks affected by aluminosis have been replaced in phases.
- Torre Baró — Torre Baró is a hillside neighbourhood of Nou Barris named after a vanished tower, born of a failed garden-city scheme and grown from the 1940s by self-building, until a neighbours' action brought the 47 bus up to it in 1978.
- Ciutat Meridiana — Ciutat Meridiana is a neighbourhood of blocks raised from 1963 in a steep valley of Nou Barris, where residents have had to press for clinics, schools, a market and even escalators to cope with its level changes.
- Vallbona — Vallbona is the productive edge Barcelona still retains: running water in the Rec Comtal, cultivated ground, farmhouses, metropolitan infrastructure and a small neighbourhood that has survived between development plans, isolation and real agricultural work.