Trams in Barcelona
tram system
Historically, the city of Barcelona, in the Spanish autonomous community of Catalonia, had a large tramway network. The city's first tram line opened in 1872, but almost all of these historic lines had closed by 1971, being replaced by buses and by the expanding Barcelona Metro. The one remaining line, the Tramvia Blau, was retained as tourist attraction, using historic rolling stock. However at the beginning of the 21st century, two new tram systems, the Trambaix and Trambesòs, opened in the suburbs of the city.
History
The first tramway line in Barcelona was the Barcelona-Gràcia (Josepets), a horse tramway that opened by the Barcelona Tramways company on 28 June 1872. Within a few years, lines were built throughout Barcelona and many of its surrounding villages. As the tramways helped to integrate the metropolis, these villages became quarters of today's Barcelona.
In the Eixample expansion planned by the Cerdà Plan, the tramways found that the wide streets and intersections with block chamfers allowed easy turns.
Lines were built by a number of companies, but by the 1900s the two main companies were Barcelona Tramways and Compañía General de Tranvías. Electrification took place in the 1900s, with the introduction of route numbers following from 1910 onwards.
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This entry incorporates text from “Trams in Barcelona” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.