The year 1994 marked a milestone in the history of television, with the premiere of Poble Nou. The TV3 series, the first Catalan daily telenovela, kept the evening audience hooked – with an average of 39% of the screen share and some peaks of more than 1,250,000 viewers – throughout 192 episodes. Its protagonists were the Aiguader Miró family. In other words: the marriage formed by Antòniu (Miquel Cors) and Rosa (Margarida Minguillón) and their three children, Ferran (Joel Joan), Anna (Gemma Brió) and Martí (Quim Gutiérrez). After winning the Lotto with the unlikely combination of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, they moved to live in a newly built building in Barcelona’s Olympic Village.
As a leitmotiv, the soap opera showed the tension between the old city –represented by the Poblenou neighborhood– and the new capital that was born under the push of the Olympic Games: long-time residents who looked askance at the newcomers, evictions to build new buildings, historical references that disappeared, loss of identity… And viewers soon became familiar with their scenarios. Today, three decades later, most are still easily recognizable.
Starting with the Aiguader block, located at the beginning of Joan Miró street. Here they bought an apartment for 40 million pesetas (about 240,000 euros) and made friends with their new neighbors. Especially with Helena (Teresa Manresa) and her niece and adopted daughter, Júlia (Irene Montalà). The building retains the same appearance on the outside as in the series, except for the entrance fence, which did not exist then. Above its terraces, two symbols of that renewed Barcelona appear: the Arts hotel and the Mapfre tower.
Turning the street you reach Icària Avenue, the central artery of Vila Olímpica, where the family business seemed to be located. It was the old winery run by Antòniu’s aunt, Tieta Victòria (Lola Lizaran), later converted into a supermarket with Loto money. The place symbolically connected the old neighborhood, on one end, with the new one, on the other.
Although the façade never appeared on screen, the exposed brick walls of the buildings outside could be seen through the glass door. In addition, some character had been seen on the way to the supermarket passing under the iconic pergolas on Icària Avenue. They are a kind of painted steel and wood trees that were made by architects Carme Pinós and Enric Miralles in 1992.
Likewise, nearby is the Port Olímpic, the scene of the first murder in Poble Nou. The victim was Ricard (Enric Arredondo), a shady musician who returned to Barcelona after a few years of working in Germany. His body appeared in the photo stands.
Today, however, it is difficult to imagine that there were no witnesses to the crime. The Port Olímpic is a permanently busy point thanks to a wide commercial, restaurant and leisure offer. Built in 1990 as the venue for the sailing competitions of the Games, it is now preparing to host the women’s and youth competitions of the America’s Cup.
The Poblenou park was a frequent setting for the soap opera. Several characters shared confidences and sorrows in this other emblem of the Olympic reconversion (formerly it was an area occupied by industries and train tracks). The green area houses as a sculpture the remains of a drug ship: it is the Ashraf II, intercepted in the 1980s with a large cache and which for years was abandoned in Port Vell.
Likewise, numerous scenes were filmed on Bogatell beach. Recovered with the restoration of the city’s maritime façade in the 1990s, the needle-shaped sculpture that marks it – a metal obelisk by Antoni Rosselló that separates the city from the sea – became another familiar icon for television viewers.
Images of the Rambla del Poblenou were recurring in the series. You couldn’t miss the promenade that structures the neighborhood, with its mix of modernist stately homes, new buildings, bars and shops. Here some dialogues were filmed between Rosa and her brother Xavier (Jordi Boixaderas), whom Antòniu did not want to see in her house or in painting.
La Rambla, laid out in the Cerdà plan – to which the logo of the series alluded – has historically been a forum for associative life, with the Casino de l’Aliança as a major exponent. In the fiction, the Casinet bar made a nod to this institution with more than a century and a half of history.
In the Poblenou cemetery they buried Emília de Gironella (Maria Jenús Lleonart), a former relationship of Antòniu’s obsessed with him. A farewell that brought together all the protagonists of the series and in which the cameras were recreated with mausoleums and sculptures, such as the Kiss of Death, by Jaume Barba.
This cemetery, the first outside the walls of Barcelona, ??has two areas: the original, which dates back to 1775; and the expansion of the second half of the 19th century, when the bourgeoisie built tombs and pavilions of great artistic quality. The remains of Josep Anselm Clavé, Narcís Monturiol, Lola Anglada, Frederic Soler “Pitarra”, Narcís Oller and Mary Santpere rest here. It is another of the emblems of the neighborhood.
A little further away, in the Besòs neighborhood, is the house where Emília lived with her son Marc (Roger Pera). She herself gave the address in an episode: Maresme, 32. In the area, however, there is no trace of the gray cement façade that appeared in the television series.
And the scene that has disappeared is the temple where the aunt Victòria and her lifelong friend Andreu (Alfred Luchetti) were married. This is the church of Sant Bernat Calbó, in the square of the same name, which had to be demolished years later due to serious deterioration of the concrete. Here the author of the Poble Nou script, Josep Maria Benet i Jornet, made a cameo. It was he who took a photo of the couple and predicted a happy future for them. “If you say so…” Andreu smiled.
