T-100. A Hundred Years of metro exhibition

The Department of Territory, Housing and Ecological Transition of the Generalitat de Catalunya (Governement of Catalonia) is presenting this exhibition to relive the history of the metro.

The exhibition reviews the 100 years of a means of transport that, through its growth, has helped shape the city and has successfully connected the neighborhoods of Barcelona and its metropolitan area, facilitating daily mobility.

This exhibition chronologically traces the history of the metro since 1924. Since then, the metro has gone through various operational stages, ranging from the driving of the first trains to automation, and from manual ticket sales to digitalization. All this evolution has taken place through a colossal civil engineering effort, remarkable both for its technical complexity and its century-long scope—transitioning from hand-dug stations to modern engineering works that include stations located thirty meters underground.

The metro has become part of the collective imagination of our lives, and now the exhibition traces all these stages through six clearly defined areas for visitors: Dreaming the Future, The Metro Builds the City, Move and Respond, Metro Manual, Anticipating the Future, and The Metro Builds Identity.

In Dreaming the Future, the first stop of the exhibition, visitors will discover the context in which metro systems emerged as a response to the mobility needs of modern cities. This space explains the birth of the first metro systems around the world, which rapidly expanded during the Industrial Revolution. Inside a tunnel-shaped structure, visitors can access The Metro Builds the City, where they will follow an emotional timeline highlighting the most significant milestones in the history of the metro and the city. Through images, texts, and testimonial videos, the experiences of many people who have been part of this century-old story are shared.

The third area, called Move and Respond, invites visitors into a metro car where they can interact with touchscreens to discover interesting facts about the metro and its operations. In the fourth area, they will enter the Metro Manual, which explains how such a major civil engineering project is built. This space resembles a station and presents, in a clear and educational way, all the steps involved in metro construction—from underground analysis to architecture and final building.

In Anticipating the Future, the metro network envisioned for its 125th anniversary, in the year 2050, is presented. Future expansions are shown on a dynamic map of Catalonia in 2050, where the country’s major railway projects are interconnected.

The exhibition concludes with a look at the metro’s influence on literature, cinema, and social media in the space The Metro Builds Identity. This section includes major artistic productions that have featured the metro as a protagonist or as a backdrop.

The exhibition will be open every day of the week between October 31 and February 1, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday to Saturday, and from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Sundays, public holidays, and on December 24 and 31 and January 5.
On December 25 and 26 and January 1 and 6, the space will be closed.

The exhibition is completely free of charge.