Nou Barris
Nou Barris: thirteen peripheral barris 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 | Income (section mean) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 is a composite neighbourhood: a rural name documented since the Middle Ages, a manor converted into a civic centre, heavy metropolitan corridors and an administrative boundary that leaves part of Santa Eulàlia’s old nucleus across Fabra i Puig. This seam matters more than an artificial historical unity.
- Porta — Porta is not a metaphorical “gateway” into Barcelona. Its name preserves Can Porta and a landscape of farmhouses, fields and routes absorbed by apartment blocks, major roads, metropolitan retail and public facilities. Reading the neighbourhood well means moving from surviving estates to spaces residents won, and from the infrastructure crossing it to the networks keeping it habitable.
- el Turó de la Peira — Turó de la Peira is an intensely dense neighbourhood built on ground once occupied by an estate and park, marked by accelerated housing, decades of neighbourhood organisation and the trauma of aluminosis. Its history did not end with the 1990 collapse: it continues through rehabilitation, demolition, rebuilding, facilities and the question of who pays to maintain a city built quickly.
- Can Peguera — Can Peguera is an urban exception that did not survive by accident: a public “cheap houses” estate built from 1929 to 1932 to rehouse families mainly from Montjuïc’s shantytowns, condemned to disappear for decades and consolidated through neighbourhood resistance. Its low scale preserves a history of housing policy, stigma, care and the right to remain.
- la Guineueta — La Guineueta is a late-1960s neighbourhood built over fields and around a torrent, but its name predates the blocks: it comes from the lost Can Guineueta farmhouse. The park, Ca n’Ensenya, schools and major edge institutions show how a housing estate acquired centrality, memory and public space.
- Canyelles — Canyelles is Barcelona’s last great residential estate built before democracy: blocks set into a hillside, generous spaces between buildings, and a neighbourhood that received housing before schools, shops, transport or civic facilities. Its physical form was planned; its urban life had to be demanded and made by residents.
- les Roquetes — Les Roquetes was made against the slope and against institutional delay. Family-built houses, streets cut through rock, sewers laid on Sundays and decades of campaigns for water, paving, transport and facilities turn the hillside into a physical archive of popular urbanism.
- Verdun — Verdun is a triangle of only 23.7 hectares containing two major Franco-era housing operations, extraordinary density and street life sustained by shops and local networks. The name of a European battle became a domestic address here, but the real history is thousands of families inhabiting and repairing housing produced in haste.
- la Prosperitat — La Prosperitat is one of Barcelona’s densest and most associationally powerful neighbourhoods: a mesh of houses and blocks filled within decades, with squares and facilities won before they were programmed. Its optimistic name is not a generic Franco-era slogan but the trace of a cooperative and small residential nucleus predating mass growth.
- la Trinitat Nova — La Trinitat Nova is a neighbourhood built twice: first from 1953 to 1963 as rapid public housing for a growing city, then from the late 1990s through renewal that replaced defective blocks and tried to retain community through years of moves, demolition and construction.
- Torre Baró — Torre Baró is a mountain city built against gravity and against waiting: homes raised incrementally, streets opened before every service arrived, walls holding up plots, and the silhouette of an unfinished castle that has come to represent a neighbourhood far more complex than its postcard.
- Ciutat Meridiana — Ciutat Meridiana is a vertical city planned on a gradient its project underestimated: blocks, footbridges, stairs and lifts operating as an everyday transport network, and a community that has had to turn rapidly built housing into a complete neighbourhood.
- 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.