T-100. A Hundred Years of metro exhibition

The Department of Territory, Housing and Ecological Transition of the Generalitat de Catalunya (Government of Catalonia) had presented this exhibition to relive the history of the metro.

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

This exhibition chronologically traced the history of the metro since 1924. Since then, the metro had 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 had 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 included stations located thirty meters underground.

The metro become part of the collective imagination of our lives, and the exhibition then traced 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 discovered the context in which metro systems had emerged as a response to the mobility needs of modern cities. This space explained the birth of the first metro systems around the world, which had rapidly expanded during the Industrial Revolution. Inside a tunnel‑shaped structure, visitors could access The Metro Builds the City, where they followed 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 had been part of this century‑old story were shared.

The third area, called Move and Respond, invited visitors into a metro car where they could interact with touchscreens to discover interesting facts about the metro and its operations. In the fourth area, they entered the Metro Manual, which explained how such a major civil engineering project was built. This space resembled a station and presented, 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, was presented. Future expansions were shown on a dynamic map of Catalonia in 2050, where the country’s major railway projects were interconnected.

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

The exhibition was opened 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 was closed.

The exhibition was completely free of charge.