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Barcelona's heritage model for Olympics
With the Beijing Olympics in full swing, and British minds already looking forward to the London Games in 2012, commentators are assessing past Olympics and their impact on the host cities.
While Beijing’s opening ceremony will almost certainly go down in history as the best ever, Barcelona is gaining plaudits as the most successful in regenerating a city. The 1992 Games, most agree, were a huge factor in Barcelona’s current success. Not only was the city transformed physically, the rebranding has also made Barcelona one of Europe’s top city break destinations.
Writer Simon Usborne says in Britain’s Independent newspaper that the Olympics transformed the city’s nondescript coastal areas with now three miles of beaches and the number of restaurants for bathers rocketing from seven to seventy.
Barcelona has also shot up the rankings of a city to do business in and the number of hotel rooms more than doubled from 1990 to 2004. The recent success Spain has been enjoying in many sports is also linked by some to the catalyst effect of the Barcelona Olympics with the world-beating facilities that were created allied to top-class coaches.
Organisers of the London Olympics, concerned about the heritage impact of the Games, have been studying Barcelona carefully as the Catalan city has shown that the Olympics can really deliver improvements and not leave behind facilities that never find a real use once the Games are over.
This article was written for TravelSavvy Europe by Bob Cartwright. If you know of an interesting European travel related news story, please get in contact.
