Barcelona is a Mediterranean city. It has 13.2km of seafront of which 9km are taken up by the Autonomous Port of Barcelona and the Olympic Port. Both ports represent 68% of the total of the Barcelona coastline. The rest is taken up by reclaimed beaches, above all resulting from the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games and the 2004 Forum of Cultures.
Barcelona seafront with the Barceloneta neighbourhood
in the foreground and the port facilities in the background
Before 1992, it is often said that Barcelona "lived with its back to the sea". The Autonomous Port of Barcelona dominates the seafront of the city centre, while the Olympic Port, much smaller, forms the seafront part of the Olympic Village, to the north-east of the former. The Olympic Port is merely a marina, while the Autonomous Port of Barcelona has a range of functions: commercial port, passenger port, fishing harbour and marina.
Barcelona currently has 6 beaches which are intensely used as swimming and sunbathing areas, particularly between May and September. Outside this period, a few gulls take refuge on the beaches. While the beaches provide a soft substrate, the dikes and jetties protecting the beaches and the ports of Barcelona give them the only hard substrate of this stretch of the coast. Here are found creatures adapted to this habitat, such as for example seaweed, mussels, sea snails, sea urchins, crabs and bearlet anemones.
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