Park Güell begins to recover the rate of visitors after the tourist collapse due to the pandemic. Despite the symptoms of improvement, the numbers of public influx are still far away when compared to before the outbreak of the covid. At that time, an annual volume of about nine million users was recorded compared to the 4.65 million, including tourists and residents, registered during 2022. The City Council attributes this decrease to the change in the access model applied in pandemic times to avoid crowds.
With the arrival of the virus and after the months of confinement, the site reopened in July 2020, expanding the monumental regulated area from 1.7 hectares to 12 hectares.
If in 2019 some 3.5 million tourists paid to visit the central area with the famous Dragon staircase and the viewpoint with the unique trencadis benches in Plaza de la Naturaleza, another 5.5 million did not buy a ticket but walked through the upper part, then free access. After expanding the monumental payment area, the municipal coffers now also collect more by selling more tickets, with the presence of 4.2 million tourists last year.
Some data that the Councilor for Climate Emergency and Ecological Transition and the district of Gràcia, Eloi Badia, has valued positively this Thursday and in his opinion show the return to “normality” to this fantasy space devised by Antoni Gaudí, world heritage Cultural Heritage of Humanity by Unesco since 1984. For Badia, these numbers meet one of the municipal objectives aimed at reducing “tourist pressure” in this enclave of the city and “encouraging cultural and neighborhood uses”.
As for residents, 450,000 come to this space for free thanks to exclusive time slots for residents of adjacent neighborhoods in the morning and afternoon, of which 151,865 do so in the morning and 76,917 in the evening. To these figures must be added those who enter without paying prior registration in the Gaudir Més, with 155,000 registrations last year. Badia also highlighted that more than twenty cultural activities were organized in the park in 2022 with the participation of nearly eight thousand people.
On the other hand, the strategic plan of Park Güell, started in 2018, will maintain its continuity with an investment of 16 million generated with income from tickets until 2026. Among the future actions, the purchase of a hundred-year-old house in the outskirts stands out of the park to convert it into a municipal facility, where the La Miranda neighborhood and cultural association is now rented.
