Platja del Bogatell

This guide to Platja del Bogatell in Barcelona starts with the fifteen thousand people who once lived on this stretch of shoreline in Somorrostro, an unofficial settlement of shacks cleared almost overnight in 1966 ahead of a visit from Francisco Franco. It follows the decades after, when a freight rail line and nineteenth-century factories kept this coast an industrial strip locals called the Catalan Manchester, with nowhere to swim. You'll hear what changed on the thirty-first of May, 1989, and how the city set about remaking the waterfront afterward. Look across the boardwalk at Poblenou Cemetery, older than everything else along this shore.