Albert Balanzà

It’s Catalonia’s second-largest city, stretching south of Barcelona towards the airport, but most visitors will pass through without even registering the name. L’Hospitalet was little more than a village until the 19th century, when waves of industrialisation transformed it, culminating in the post-war boom of the 1960s that saw vast tracts of high-rise housing flung up to accommodate workers from the rest of Spain. City planning lagged behind the population explosion, and residents had to fight for such basic amenities as health centres and schools. Since the 1990s, large-scale infrastructure projects have turned a suburban hinterland into a city in its own right, with a personality in constant evolution emerging from immigrant communities from all over world. As young artists are attracted by cheap, post-industrial property, some have called it Barcelona’s Brooklyn – a place with an energy and life many Barcelona residents would envy, if only they knew what they were missing.