Barceloneta

Barceloneta is the beach in front of the eighteenth-century fishermen's quarter of the same name, at the southern end of Barcelona's coastline. It is about a kilometre long, and it is the busiest of the city's beaches because it is the one you can walk to from the old town.

It did not exist in its present form before 1992. Barcelona's waterfront was industrial — rail yards, factories, sewage outfalls — and the city turned its back on the sea. The Olympic redevelopment demolished the industry, built the Port Olímpic, and created four and a half kilometres of beach with imported sand. It is now the standard international example of waterfront regeneration, studied and copied, and the reason the city's relationship with its coast is only a generation old.

The sand is coarse golden fill, replenished after storms, on a shore protected by breakwaters that keep the Mediterranean flat most of the year. The water is clean enough for daily swimming and is monitored publicly. Frank Gehry's copper fish stands at the northern end and Rebecca Horn's stacked-cubes sculpture on the sand itself. The four beaches created in 1992 — Sant Sebastià, Barceloneta, Nova Icària and Bogatell — were laid out as one continuous shore, and walking north along it the crowd thins with every breakwater. Barceloneta is the first and therefore the fullest.

Development is a city edge rather than a resort: a promenade with restaurants, a cycle lane, volleyball courts, showers, lifeguards and a great many people. Chiringuitos operate in season. Pickpocketing on this beach is a genuine and well-documented problem, and the standard local advice is to take nothing you cannot lose.

None of this existed in 1992. Barcelona built its beaches for the Olympics on ground that had been industrial and then a shanty settlement, and the city has been arguing about the consequences ever since. Swim, walk the front, and understand that the residents' complaints about tourism are about this stretch more than anywhere.