Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport
Facts on BCN
In December 2018 the Spanish government renamed Barcelona's airport to Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat, honoring the first president of Catalonia under Spain's current constitution, a move the Catalan regional government criticized because it wasn't consulted.
Source: Wikipedia
Josep Tarradellas (1899–1988) was named president of the Generalitat in 1954 and led Catalonia's government from exile in France for 23 years. He returned in October 1977, two years after Franco's death, greeting the crowd with "Ciutadans de Catalunya, ja sóc aquí!" — Citizens of Catalonia, I am here at last.
Source: Wikipedia
The other half of the name is a town. El Prat de Llobregat sits on the river's delta, and its flat ground attracted three private aerodromes in 1923; their unification in 1948 produced Barcelona's airport, which now covers more than a quarter of the municipality.
Source: Wikipedia
El Prat's Terminal 1, opened in 2009, was designed by celebrated Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill, and the airport itself traces back to a military aerodrome first built on the marshy Llobregat river delta in 1916.
Source: Wikipedia
Barcelona's first airfield was at El Remolar in 1916, but it had no room to grow, so a new one opened at El Prat in 1918. The first aircraft to arrive was a Latécoère Salmson 300 flown in from Toulouse and bound onward for Casablanca.
Source: Wikipedia
Scheduled service began in 1927 with an Iberia flight to Madrid's Cuatro Vientos — the airline's very first route. Barcelona's first overseas link followed in 1948, when Pan American World Airways flew a Lockheed Constellation to New York.
Source: Wikipedia
The Barcelona–Madrid shuttle, the Pont Aeri, was the busiest air route in the world, running 971 flights a week in 2007. Schedules were cut back from February 2008, when a high-speed rail line opened between the two cities with a journey time of 2 hours 30 minutes.
Source: Wikipedia
In 2025 the airport handled a record 57,483,036 passengers, up 4.4% on the previous year. The Plan Barcelona expansion finished in 2009 nearly doubled its footprint, from 8.45 to 15.33 square kilometres, and added a second parallel runway alongside the existing pair.
Source: Wikipedia
El Prat accepts only instrument-flight-rules traffic; the exceptions are medical, emergency and government flights operating visually. Across its two terminals the airport counted 268 check-in desks and 64 boarding gates as of 2014, with Terminal 1 alone holding 258 of those desks and 60 jetways.
Source: Wikipedia
On 14 October 2019, hours after Catalan independence leaders were sentenced, thousands of protesters summoned by Democratic Tsunami flooded the airport's access roads and concourses. Police shut down bus, metro and rail access, and more than a hundred flights were cancelled that day.
Source: Wikipedia