Things to Do with Kids in Sants-Montjuïc

Environmental Play at the Botanical Garden offers free Sunday mornings combining open exploration with guided workshops and tours led by educators. Activities rotate weekly and include building wish trees, creating mandalas with seeds, discovering insects and birds, making paper flowers, planting seasonal flowers, weaving, and exploring specific plant species like dragon trees and eucalyptus. The program runs January through July and September through December.

The Last Days of Pompeii is an immersive exhibition recreating daily life in the ancient Roman city before Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. The experience combines historical scenographies, immersive projections, and sound design to trace Pompeii's trajectory from prosperity to catastrophe, integrating archaeological finds and visual recreations that reveal how inhabitants lived and what occurred during the eruption's final hours.

Discover Joan Miró's artistic methods through hands-on experimentation. Participants explore the exhibition rooms while trying drawing, collage, ink staining, and object play techniques. Each child documents their actions in a work notebook that becomes the foundation for creating original artworks, mirroring Miró's own creative process.

A workshop where children install elastic bands from wall to wall to create a collective art installation inspired by Piet Mondrian's geometric compositions. Participants work in groups with a monitor to build an ephemeral maze-like structure using colored lines placed in any direction, then explore and play within their creation.

L'orquestra de cartró is a 90-minute workshop by artist Mónica Rikić combining art, electronics, and play. Participants build a sound sculpture using cardboard, electronic motors, vibrators, and basic components, learning how these elements work while creating a unique instrument they take home.

A learning activation space at CaixaForum featuring reference books, games, and experimental materials for discovering architecture. An educator supports visitors as they explore, play, and learn through hands-on resources. The activity is part of Barcelona 2026 World Capital of Architecture programming.

Barcelona rings in the new year with a free open-air show of drones, fireworks, light beams and music on Avinguda de la Reina Maria Cristina, the wide avenue running up to Montjuïc from Plaça d'Espanya. Tens of thousands of people gather along the avenue to watch the spectacle, which is staged by the French company Groupe F and choreographed to a soundtrack blending traditional Catalan instruments with electronic sound. The show runs through the final minutes before midnight and into the first minutes of the new year. It's free, with no tickets or capacity limits, and there is a reserved viewing area for people with reduced mobility.

The Picornell pools sit in Montjuic's Olympic Ring and hosted the 1992 Olympic swimming and water polo finals. The complex has two 50m pools, one open-air and one indoor, plus a separate diving pool. A day pass covers the pools, gym, sauna, and Jacuzzi. The outdoor pool runs April to October; the indoor pool stays open year round and requires a swim cap.

Built by Carles Buigas for the 1929 International Expo, the Font Màgica sits at the foot of the Palau Nacional, where Avinguda de la Reina Maria Cristina runs down to Plaça d'Espanya. After dark it runs a free water, light, and music show: around 2,600 liters a second move through three concentric pools, lit in shifting colors and set to music that ranges from film soundtracks to pop. Kids watch from the steps or the wide plaza below.

An open-air museum of 117 full-scale buildings copied from towns across Spain, laid out as a walkable village with squares, stepped streets, and a bell tower. Kids can watch glassblowers, potters, and other artisans at work in their workshops, follow a riddle-based scavenger hunt, and run between the plazas. The Fran Daurel art museum and a sculpture garden sit inside the walls.

Mies van der Rohe built this pavilion for Germany at the 1929 International Exposition; it was demolished after the fair and rebuilt stone by stone in 1986. There are no rooms to queue through: kids roam freely between floating marble walls, spot the bronze statue in the small pool, and watch reflections shift across the water and green glass. A visit takes 20 to 30 minutes, and the Fundació runs occasional family workshops.

A car-free, tree-shaded square ringed by around a dozen bar and café terraces (Fo Bar, La Mestressa, Vermut i a la Gàbia). It was the commercial heart of Sants until the covered market opened in 1913, and it keeps a village feel. The play area is small, so the real draw is the open, paved space where families spread out, busiest on Sunday around noon for vermut.

Climbat La Foixarda is a 2,000 m² municipal climbing center on the Montjuïc hillside, built into a converted old sports hall by the Foixarda tunnel. Kids climb roped routes, boulders, and auto-belays, and the climbing school runs as a weekly extraescolar: a children's track for ages 4 to 13 and a youth track to 18, grouped by age and ability.

A members aquatics club founded in 1931, spread across two Sants and Les Corts sites with a 50m outdoor pool, two 25m pools, two 12.5m teaching pools, a fitness room, and a spa. Kids learn through baby swimming, graded swim courses from age 6, and artistic (synchronized) swimming, alongside water polo, athletics, triathlon, karate, squash, and table tennis.

A tree-lined Poble-sec square built around an ornate cast-iron fountain, with a small play area and a wide paved center where toddlers and young kids run around. Plane trees give shade, benches line the edges, and cafe terraces ring the square so adults can sit close by. The Centre Civic El Sortidor on the plaza runs a year-round program of children's shows and workshops.

A large park beside Barcelona-Sants station, built on a former textile mill, with an artificial lake ringed by nine white lighthouse towers and terraced steps. The headline for kids is El Drac, a 32-meter steel dragon by Andrés Nagel that doubles as a slide: children climb onto its back and shoot out of its mouth. A separate fenced playground serves younger ones, with open plazas for scooters.

A lookout on the seaward side of Montjuïc, just past the castle, where pine-wood paths zigzag up to balconies with a wide panorama over the port and open Mediterranean. There is a large picnic area with wooden tables under the pines, drinking fountains, and flat open ground for kids to run. La Caseta del Migdia, a small open-air bar with grilled food and summer live music, keeps irregular seasonal hours, so pack your own water and snacks.

An aerial cable car that climbs 750 meters up Montjuïc to the medieval castle at the top. The eight-person glass cabins give a slow, smooth ride with a constantly changing view over the port, the Sagrada Família and the sea. A return ticket lets you hop off at the castle to walk the ramparts and gardens, then ride back down the same day.

The 1992 Olympic stadium opens its visiting area to the public: the athletics track and field, the tiered stands, and the Marathon Gate framed by Pau Gargallo's two horse-rider sculptures. Ramón Bigas's tilted Olympic cauldron rises just outside. The surrounding Olympic Ring esplanade has fountains, sculptures, and wide-open space to run.

An 18th-century military fortress on the 173-meter Montjuïc hill, built in a star shape with angled bastions, a dry moat crossed by a stone bridge, and a watchtower. Kids can walk the ramparts, peer through gun embrasures at the rusted coastal cannons, and cross the drawbridge into the parade ground. The wraparound terrace gives a 360-degree view over the harbor, the sea, and the rooftops below.

Joan Miró's own collection of paintings, sculptures, tapestries, and drawings fills the white Josep Lluís Sert building on Montjuïc, with skylit galleries built around courtyards. Kids gravitate to the big bright colors and odd bronze creatures, Calder's Mercury Fountain behind glass, and the rooftop sculpture terrace that looks out over the city.

The museum fills the Palau Nacional, the domed 1929 palace above the Magic Fountain on Montjuïc. Inside, whole apses of 11th- to 13th-century church frescoes are mounted in curved rooms, alongside Gothic altarpieces, Renaissance and baroque paintings, and modern Catalan work by Gaudí, Casas, and Dalí. Rooftop terraces open onto a long view down to Plaça d'Espanya.

A cultural center set in the Casaramona textile factory, a 1911 Modernist landmark by Puig i Cadafalch, with a glass-and-steel entrance added by Arata Isozaki. Visitors ride escalators down to a lobby painted with a giant Sol LeWitt mural, then up to rotating art and history exhibitions. The CaixaForum Kids program runs workshops, concerts, and film screenings for children.