Sant Martí · 73

la Verneda i la Pau

La Verneda i la Pau is made from layers that remain physically distinct: fields and irrigation, factories, housing estates, cooperatives, rebuilt blocks and facilities won through collective action. Its two names join a wet landscape of trees to a Franco-era slogan that residents eventually reclaimed for themselves.

Begin in Plaça de la Palmera. Read the chimney, replanted palm, surrounding blocks and Richard Serra's curved wall together. Within a few metres are vanished agriculture, industry, a private housing scheme stopped by neighbourhood mobilisation, public art and the daily maintenance of a hard-won square. Then compare it with Via Trajana and the La Pau estate: this neighbourhood was never built in one operation.

La Verneda i la Pau occupies the north-eastern edge of Sant Martí, between residential fabrics, former industrial land, Gran Via, Rambla de Prim, the municipal boundary with Sant Adrià de Besòs and the Sagrera railway zone. The administrative neighbourhood defined in 2006 combines pieces created at different times, under different housing regimes and even across different municipalities.

Until the mid-twentieth century, fields, market gardens, farmhouses, irrigation and scattered factories dominated. Via Trajana, Verneda developments, the La Pau estate, cooperatives and housing associated with companies or public bodies followed. Many homes arrived before schools, sewers, traffic lights, health care and green space. Residents spent decades completing the everyday city that the housing schemes had omitted.

la Verneda i la Pau (neighbourhood 73) highlighted. Other neighbourhoods in Sant Martí: el Camp de l'Arpa del Clot, el Clot, el Parc i la Llacuna del Poblenou, la Vila Olímpica del Poblenou, el Poblenou, Diagonal Mar i el Front Marítim del Poblenou.

Where the name comes from

Verneda means a place with verns—alders associated with damp ground and water margins. The name preserves a landscape shaped by channels connected to the Besòs and Riera d'Horta, but should not be used as proof of one intact alder wood beneath every present block.

La Pau comes from the estate built by the Francoist Obra Sindical del Hogar and officially inaugurated in 1966 within the dictatorship's propaganda campaign marking “25 years of peace”. The phrase suppressed the Civil War's violence and subsequent repression. Residents nevertheless appropriated the ordinary, positive meaning of peace. Both histories belong on the page.

Toward Besòs, Sant Martí de Provençals, and municipal edges.

Before the neighbourhood

The ground belonged to the agricultural plain of Sant Martí de Provençals. Fields, gardens, farmhouses including Can Riera and Can Planas, irrigation channels and paths occupied low fertile land also exposed to flooding. Late nineteenth-century painters associated with the Colla del Safrà represented Verneda's fields, but their images should not turn working land into scenery without labour, ownership or conflict.

Industry arrived before residential urbanisation was complete: textiles, chemicals, metalworking, storage and other uses occupied large plots beside cultivation. Control of the Besòs, channelisation of the Riera d'Horta, railways and metropolitan roads changed water, movement and land value.

How the streets were made

There is no single urban grammar. Via Trajana began in 1953 as low blocks on the Barcelona–Sant Adrià boundary, disconnected from the consolidated city. Verneda Alta, the Palmera area, Guipúscoa and other schemes combined cooperatives, private development and public assistance. La Pau introduced towers and slabs, large but initially unfinished open spaces and a strong separation of housing, commerce and major roads.

Rambla de Guipúscoa and Rambla de Prim became civic and transport axes; Cantàbria, Menorca, Concili de Trento and Ca n'Oliva stitched together pieces that first behaved like islands. The 1994–2004 reconstruction of Via Trajana replaced defective blocks and remade courtyards, public space and facilities while retaining a distinct border identity.

Dates that changed it

Medieval period–nineteenth century: fields, farmhouses, irrigation and routes across the Sant Martí plain; document each object.
Mid-nineteenth–early twentieth century: industrial expansion among gardens and large plots.
1953: initial Via Trajana estate, roughly nineteen blocks and 656 homes; verify the exact block count.
1950s–1960s: rapid Verneda developments, cooperatives and housing associated with companies and public bodies.
1966: official inauguration of the La Pau estate within the “25 years of peace” propaganda campaign.
1968: formation of the La Pau residents' association.
1977–1984: mobilisation, municipal acquisition and opening of Plaça de la Palmera; verify each legal milestone.
1978: La Verneda–Sant Martí Adult School begins as a grassroots, self-managed project.
From 1979: democratic government and neighbourhood pressure accelerate schools, health care, sewers, lighting, traffic controls and facilities.
1982 / 1997: La Pau opens on L4 and later receives L2.
1994–2004: Via Trajana reconstruction and rehousing; first new blocks delivered in 1997.
2006: current administrative neighbourhood defined.
2022: Via Trajana community mural assembled from thousands of residents' photographs.
2025–2026: Housing and transformation plans for the Prim area advance through distinct implementation stages.

People and collective life

Early residents came in large numbers through internal migration, shack settlements and precarious housing, but the population was never uniform. Industrial and railway workers, service staff, small traders, cooperative households, public employees, Roma families and international migration arrived in different decades.

Women sustained care, cleaning, child-rearing, shopping networks, schools, health campaigns and mobilisation while disappearing from accounts centred on designers or male leaders. Andalusian and Galician cultural organisations, sports clubs, parishes, associations, festivals and mutual-aid networks turned dormitory estates into collective life. The democratically governed Adult School—built around participants and volunteers—became one of Europe's most influential neighbourhood-based popular-education institutions.

People behind the buildings

Housing boards, trade-union bodies, cooperatives and developers commissioned the blocks, but builders, installers, caretakers, maintenance workers and families made small flats habitable. Via Trajana's reconstruction is not merely an architectural project: it is the story of 656 households negotiating return, memory and community continuity.

Plaça de la Palmera combines an industrial chimney, a palm replaced after red-palm-weevil damage and Richard Serra's El mur. Public art depends on gardeners, cleaners, repair workers and local use; residents' incomprehension or everyday appropriation is part of its history. The Via Trajana mural, initiated through mutual-aid networks and local artists, turns family archives into a collective façade.

Institutions

Centre Cívic Sant Martí, La Verneda–Sant Martí Adult School, Mercat de Sant Martí, CAP La Pau, schools, institutes, community centres, parishes, clubs, residents' associations and coordinating networks form an infrastructure more important than any isolated monument. The civic centre serves Sant Martí de Provençals as well as la Verneda i la Pau.

La Pau is an interchange for L2 and L4, not L4 alone

La Pau is an interchange for L2 and L4, not L4 alone. Verneda station is on L2 but lies in Sant Adrià de Besòs rather than unambiguously inside the Barcelona neighbourhood. Timetables, accessibility, works and disruptions change over time.

Metro

Connectivity

Struggles that left a mark

Demand: Residents demanded sewers, lighting, asphalt, traffic lights, schools, clinics, transport, parks and facilities that had not arrived with the flats. In La Pau, campaigns continued over construction defects, aluminosis, damp, inadequate connections and rehabilitation. In Via Trajana, organisation was essential to secure return and preserve community during wholesale replacement.

Outcome: Long campaigns with partial wins

Demand: Plaça de la Palmera exists as public space because mobilisation stopped a private residential scheme and forced municipal acquisition. Current struggles concern energy retrofit, lifts, heat, health, affordable housing, youth space, commerce, care, road safety and how the costs and benefits of Prim and Sagrera transformation are distributed.

Outcome: Ongoing

What can still be seen

At Plaça de la Palmera, chimney, sculpture, planting and blocks allow a reading from factory to public space. Via Trajana retains the form of an enclave between municipalities, railway and industry; the photographic mural restores the scale of lives that physical reconstruction cannot show.

In La Pau, towers, spaces between blocks and the relationship with Guipúscoa and Prim display 1960s estate planning. Market, schools, facilities, ground-floor trade and occupied benches reveal the city added afterwards. Surviving names, plots and farmhouses at the edges connect the neighbourhood to the earlier plain.

Composite official identity

Two places one code

What disappeared

Almost all fields, gardens, alder habitats, channels, farmhouses, factories and open views disappeared. The original Via Trajana blocks, courtyards and spatial relationships were also lost, even though replacement responded to serious building defects. Remembering unhealthy housing should not erase the human network formed there.

Trades, informal children's spaces, shops and minor place names vanished. Family photographs, contracts, cooperative brochures, rehousing files, women's testimony and migration histories need collecting before official history reduces the neighbourhood to construction dates.

The neighbourhood today

In 2026, la Verneda i la Pau had 30,938 residents, a density of 273.8 residents per hectare, a mean census-section income of €20,083 in 2023, 113 hectares, and 21.8% of residents holding non-Spanish nationality. Preserve these live figures and methodology: the published density derives from a 2021 series, so the indicators do not all share one reference year.

A large, diverse population includes ageing cohorts in some estates. Differences among Via Trajana, La Pau, Verneda Alta, the Palmera area and commercial axes matter as much as the neighbourhood mean. Disaggregate lifts, building condition, tenure, energy poverty, health, loneliness, shade, noise, distance to services and heat vulnerability.

Non-Spanish nationality (2026): 21.8%

What is changing

Housing rehabilitation, new public housing, the Sagrera works and Prim-area transformation may change population, prices, traffic, services and local centres. The announced Prim scheme includes thousands of homes and a high protected share, but every figure must carry a legal status: proposal, approval, land management, design, tender, construction or delivered dwelling.

Spaces between blocks are also changing through shade, drainage, play, school routes, maintenance and accessibility. Track community health, staffing and education, shops, care networks, rent and the L4 extension towards Sagrera. Never describe future infrastructure as an existing service.

What the guides leave out

Guides rarely arrive, and may reduce Plaça de la Palmera to a Serra curiosity or Verneda to anonymous blocks. This omits that public space, services and even residential continuity were negotiated over decades.

They also miss the contradiction within the names: a vanished wet woodland and a propaganda “peace” transformed into everyday identity; an internationally influential adult school without a monumental façade; and a municipal boundary running through Via Trajana. The neighbourhood is best understood by asking who secured each service.

Read it on foot

Start: La Pau (L4) / Verneda area · End: Local civic centre

Walking (excluding stop time): 14 min · 1040 m · Estimated visit (with stops): 42 min

The geometry follows the pedestrian network between the three marked points, but it has not been verified as step-free. Check access conditions, works and opening hours before setting out. The approach from public transport is not included in the stated distance.

Name plaques

Carrer de Santander 1

Verneda / Pau

Double identity

41.42246, 2.19599

Schools

Carrer de Josep Miret 22U

leg: 330 m · 4 min

Landmark

Neighbourhood identity

41.42269, 2.19911

Civic centres

Carrer de Gretel Ammann Martínez 15

leg: 710 m · 9 min