Nature Woven into the City
On May 21, 2026, NBS4MED partners and invited stakeholders explored sites in central Barcelona and gained on-the-ground experience, guided by Neda Kostandinović, International Relations Officer at Barcelona City Council. The three sites visited (Meridiana Avenue, Glòries Park and the Poblenou Superblock) together tell a coherent story about how a dense Mediterranean city is rethinking its relationship with nature, one street and one neighbourhood at a time.
Meridiana Avenue: Returning Space to People
The session started at Meridiana Avenue, one of Barcelona’s longest and historically most car-dominated thoroughfares, stretching 7.1 kilometres through the city’s northeast. Once shaped by railways and later given over almost entirely to private vehicles, Meridiana is now undergoing a gradual but significant transformation: reducing through-traffic, widening pavements, improving cycling infrastructure, increasing tree cover and green areas, and adding rest spaces and children’s play areas along its length. The works are being carried out in phases across different sections of the avenue, reflecting a pragmatic approach to renaturalisation in an existing urban fabric. For NBS4MED partners, many working in cities where car-dominated infrastructure remains a dominant challenge, Meridiana offered a compelling example of how incremental change, when planned consistently and at scale, can fundamentally alter the character and climate comfort of an urban street.
Glòries Park: A Green Transformation at the Heart of the Metropolis
From Meridiana, partners moved to Parc de les Glòries, one of the most ambitious urban transformation projects in Barcelona’s recent history. Located at a strategic junction between the districts of Eixample and Sant Martí, the park occupies the former site of a major traffic interchange, a space that once divided neighbourhoods and concentrated noise, pollution and heat. Today it functions as a large, multifunctional green node at the heart of the city. From a nature-based solutions perspective, Glòries integrates extensive tree canopies, diverse layers of vegetation, water features and permeable soils designed to enhance biodiversity, regulate microclimates and manage stormwater through sustainable drainage. The park also forms part of the Metropolitan Network of Climate Shelters, providing shaded and thermally comfortable refuge during heatwaves. Beyond its environmental performance, it serves as a connector between urban green axes at the metropolitan level. For NBS4MED partners and stakeholders, Glòries demonstrated how large-scale urban redevelopment can be transformative not only environmentally but socially, reclaiming space for culture, leisure and everyday community life in one of the densest areas of the Mediterranean.
The Poblenou Superblock: Small Interventions, Metropolitan Impact
The final stop of the session was the Poblenou Superblock, part of Barcelona’s pioneering initiative to reorganise urban circulation by restricting through-traffic and reallocating street space to pedestrians, greenery and community uses. Located in the Sant Martí district, the superblock demonstrates how the ordinary street network can become a medium for nature-based solutions: new tree planting, permeable pavements, rainwater infiltration systems, green areas and urban furniture designed to support biodiversity and improve microclimatic conditions. What makes the superblock model particularly relevant for Mediterranean cities is its scalability. Rather than depending on the availability of large green spaces, it shows how distributed, street-level interventions can collectively generate substantial environmental and social benefits when deployed consistently across multiple neighbourhoods. Superblocks embed climate resilience directly into residential areas, improving access to cooler, greener environments for the people who live there. The visit to the Poblenou Superblock closed an afternoon rich with lessons about how urban form, mobility policy and nature-based solutions can be integrated into a coherent metropolitan strategy.
A City Showing the Way
Across the three sites, NBS4MED partners and invited stakeholders encountered a city that has moved from aspiration to implementation, demonstrating that working with nature in dense urban environments is not only possible but transformative. The session’s experiences in Barcelona will directly inform the project’s ongoing pilot actions and capacity-building work, offering models that partners can adapt and scale across the Mediterranean.
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