A hundred years of the metro in Barcelona. The archive of the engineer Adolf Weber and other unrealised projects

The first metro line in Barcelona was inaugurated on 30 December 1924 and covered the section between Plaça Catalunya and Plaça Lesseps. Within a few short years, the city gained various metropolitan railway lines: the Gran Metro (part of today's lines 3 and 4) and the Transversal (part of today's line 1, inaugurated in 1926), as well as the train in Sarrià, which provided urban transport from 1863 and operated outdoors before being shifted below ground during the years of the International Exposition of 1929.

The Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat is contributing to the centenary commemorations for the city’s metro system, with some little-known materials relating to work never carried out: the projects by the municipal architect Pere Falqués (1911) to make use of the tunnels built during the work to open up the Via Laietana, extending them towards the Estació de França, the Estació del Nord and Plaça de Catalunya, where he designed a curious loop layout; or the spectacular perspective of an elevated metro (1914) going through Plaça de Catalunya, possibly drawn by Ignacio Alfonso Vicente i Cascante and linked to a project by the engineers Castilla and Josep Maluquer Nicolau, the theorist behind the Gross-Barcelona; and other projects such as the line planned by Léon Jausseley in the Pla d’Enllaços connection project (1904).

Most notably, we are presenting a selection from the collection on the engineer Adolf Weber, recently donated to the archive, which documents the project for a circular metro network, drafted between 1924 and 1927 and designed to cover most of the Barcelona municipal area with up to seven train lines. The collection represents a complete study covering the technical aspects of the construction and use, a funding plan for carrying out the project and even detailing the journey prices envisaged. Although the execution was planned in phases (the first line was to serve Ciutat Vella, with the central station in Plaça de Sant Jaume), in the end, for unknown reasons, the work never began, and the circular metro network did not get past the project stage