Current Time in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Spain

L'Hospitalet de Llobregat lies in Catalonia, in north-eastern Spain, immediately south-west of Barcelona on the plain between Montjuic and the Llobregat river delta. With around two hundred and sixty-five thousand inhabitants squeezed into little more than twelve square kilometres, it is the second largest city in Catalonia and among the most densely populated cities in Europe. The boundary with Barcelona is invisible on the ground, and the two cities share metro lines, avenues and daily life.

The name recalls a medieval hospital that sheltered travellers on the road out of Barcelona. For centuries this was a farming village on fertile delta land, growing vegetables and hemp for the capital. Industry arrived in the nineteenth century with textile mills and railways, and the population multiplied after the Spanish Civil War, when hundreds of thousands of migrants from Andalusia, Extremadura and Murcia came north looking for work. Neighbourhoods such as La Torrassa and Collblanc filled with dense low-rise housing, and in the 1960s the vast Bellvitge estate of tower blocks was built on former marshland. The city that resulted is young, working class and proud of a strongly mixed identity, Catalan and Spanish at once, and now home to substantial Latin American, Moroccan, Pakistani and Chinese communities.

Its transformation over the last three decades has been striking. The Plaça d'Europa district, laid out around a circular plaza, has filled with office towers, hotels and the enormous Gran Via exhibition centre designed by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito, whose undulating facades host trade fairs including the Mobile World Congress, one of the largest technology events in the world. Fira, hotels and business services have given the city an international economic role quite separate from Barcelona's tourism.

Landmarks include the Romanesque church of Santa Eulalia de Provençana, the oldest building in the city, the eighteenth-century Casa Espanya, and above all Tecla Sala, a former textile factory converted into a cultural centre with a large public library and an exhibition hall for contemporary art. Municipal theatres, a film archive and a lively programme of neighbourhood festivals sustain a strong local cultural life, and the Catalan traditions of castells, human towers, and Sant Jordi's day of books and roses are observed enthusiastically.

Bellvitge is also the site of one of the largest hospitals in Spain, a leading centre for transplants and cancer treatment, attached to a biomedical research institute and to the health sciences campus of the University of Barcelona.

Transport is exceptional. Four metro lines, commuter and long-distance rail, the ring roads and the Gran Via serve the city, and Barcelona El Prat airport is only a few kilometres away.

Dense, hardworking and constantly renewing itself, L'Hospitalet de Llobregat offers a view of everyday metropolitan Catalonia beyond the tourist routes.