Barcelona City Council has been working for years to host major sporting events in the city, including the Tour de France. As La Vanguardia has learned from council sources, the negotiation to host the start of the Grande Boucle in 2026 or 2028 “is on the right track”, but nothing has yet been signed with the organizers.
The Barcelona administration and the managing company of the French round, ASO, staged their good harmony a year ago with a meeting in the Catalan capital. At that time, the goal was set to bring the Tour de France to Barcelona during the next mandate, which began last May and ends in 2027.
“Barcelona can become one of the only cities in the world to host the main world sporting events: the 1982 World Cup, the Olympic Games. of ’92 and, now, the departure of the Tour,” he said at the time, after meeting with the general director of the Tour, Christian Prudhomme, the deputy mayor of the city, Jaume Collboni, now mayor of Barcelona since the last elections.
Barcelona has already organized the start of the Vuelta a España in 2023, a first step to hosting the Tour de France, since the Spanish race is also organized by the ASO company. However, the departure of La Vuelta was marked by the lack of lighting as a result of the clouds that covered the sky that August 26 and the rain that fell on the city. Many of the streetlights, which had been programmed to turn on automatically, were not activated because the stage took place during daylight hours.
Barcelona has already hosted a stage of the Tour de France several times, but never the start. The last edition that passed through the city was 13 years ago, in the 2009 Tour. On that occasion, two stages were held in the Catalan city. The cyclists passed through the streets of Barcelona on July 9 and 10 with stages 6 (Girona-Barcelona with 175 kilometers) and 7 (Barcelona-Andorra with 224 kilometers) respectively.
