Els mistos

You get off the L3 metro at Mundet, and suddenly you aren’t in the Barcelona of the postcards anymore. There are no gothic arches here, no guys in knock-off Messi jerseys trying to sell you cheap mojitos. This is Horta-Guinardó—a place where people actually live, work, and probably wonder why the hell you’re standing in the middle of a concrete plaza staring at a giant box of matches.

But that’s exactly what you’re doing. Els Mistos—or 'The Matches' for those who didn't bother with the local tongue—is a 22-meter-tall steel-and-fiberglass hallucination by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. It’s Pop Art on a scale that makes you feel like an ant at a giant’s picnic. Five massive matches erupt from a blue matchbook, one of them sporting a jagged, comic-book-yellow flame that looks like it was frozen mid-explosion. Around the base, a few 'spent' matches lie scattered on the ground, bent and blackened, as if some cosmic chain-smoker just finished lighting up and tossed the debris aside.

This thing was dropped here in 1992, back when Barcelona was undergoing a massive, expensive, and frankly desperate facelift for the Olympic Games. The city was trying to prove it was more than just a dusty Mediterranean port; it wanted to be a modern European powerhouse. Part of that strategy involved scattering world-class art in neighborhoods that tourists usually ignore. It was urban acupuncture—stick a giant needle of high culture into a neglected barrio and hope the energy starts flowing.

Standing under it, you realize how unapologetically weird it is. It’s bright, it’s loud, and it’s completely devoid of the self-serious 'monumental' weight of a bronze general on a horse. It’s a celebration of the ordinary, blown up to the size of a five-story building. The colors—primary reds, yellows, and blues—have faded slightly under the brutal Catalan sun, which honestly makes it look better. It looks like it belongs here now, a permanent fixture of the Horta skyline.

But there’s a deeper layer of weirdness if you look next door. The sculpture sits right beside the Pavelló de la República, a faithful replica of the building the Spanish Republic used for the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. That was the building that originally housed Picasso’s Guernica. So, you have this playful, oversized Pop Art matchbook standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a somber reminder of the Spanish Civil War. It’s a jarring juxtaposition that perfectly sums up Barcelona: a city that is simultaneously obsessed with its tragic past and its neon-lit, avant-garde future.

Is it worth the trek? If you’re the kind of person who needs a gift shop and a guided tour to feel like you’ve 'seen' something, probably not. There’s nothing to do here but look. But if you want to see the Barcelona that exists outside the tourist bubble—the one that’s a little gritty, a little lonely, and surprisingly surreal—then yeah, it’s worth the metro fare. Go at sunset when the light hits that yellow flame and the shadows of the giant matches stretch across the plaza like skeletal fingers. It’s a quiet, strange corner of the city that reminds you that art doesn't always have to be in a museum to make you feel small.