Font Màgica de Montjuïc, Barcelona

Font Màgica de Montjuïc is the great fountain spread across this broad basin, built as the centrepiece of Barcelona’s 1929 International Exposition. Carles Buïgas i Sans designed it in art déco, turning water and illumination into a single public spectacle. The fountain belongs to a wider sequence of cascades, pools and illuminated jets along the exhibition avenue, with the Palau Nacional forming its architectural backdrop.

Look at the basin’s stepped arrangement: three concentric pools descend through changes of level, while the fountain’s oval outline gives the water a broad, theatrical reach. Beneath the pools, machinery drives the display. The installation contains 120 coloured glass prisms beneath skylights; as they turn, they alter the tones cast into the water.

Its system includes 132 electric motors, and the pumps can move 2,925 litres of water each second. The scale of the original project was considered too ambitious by some exhibition officials. Buïgas submitted 460 plans and 70 large drawings, and more than 3,000 workers completed the construction in less than a year.

The fountain opened in 1929, later survived severe deterioration, and received a complete restoration finished in 1998. What you see is both a functioning fountain and the surviving centrepiece of an engineering project designed to make an entire avenue perform.