Sant Martí de Provençals was an independent industrial town, the "Catalan Manchester," packed with textile mills and the smoking chimneys that powered Barcelona's nineteenth-century boom. As the factories closed, the district fell quiet — until the 1992 Olympics and a later wave of redevelopment reinvented it as the city's laboratory for the future, most visibly in the 22@ technology quarter that now occupies the old industrial blocks of Poblenou.
The transformation is everywhere. Jean Nouvel's luminous, bullet-shaped Torre Glòries rises over the Plaça de les Glòries, the great traffic interchange the city is slowly turning back into a park. The Rambla del Poblenou, a leafy promenade lined with old-fashioned cafés, runs down toward the sea and the long beaches of the Olympic and Fòrum waterfront. Surviving fragments of industry have been recycled into design studios, breweries and the cavernous Els Encants flea market, while the Fòrum esplanade at the district's edge hosts summer festivals on its photovoltaic canopy.
It is spread out and modern rather than picturesque, but Sant Martí offers the city's most relaxed beaches, a thriving startup-and-craft-beer scene in Poblenou, and a sense of Barcelona still actively remaking itself.