Badia del Vallès

The last train from Barcelona leaves at 23:30. Miss it and you’ll discover why taxi drivers add a €25 out-of-town surcharge for the 20 km ride to Badia del Vallès. That single fact tells you most of what you need to know about this place: useful, cheap, slightly awkward to reach, and definitely not on the city’s romantic itinerary.

Badia was thrown up between 1964 and 1970 to house factory workers who poured into the Vallès region during Spain’s economic sprint. Planners drew a perfect grid of 11-storey slabs on former farmland 120 m above sea-level, squeezed 13,000 people into 1.2 km², and called it a municipality. The result looks like a piece of south-east London air-lifted to Catalonia, only with better weather and louder mopeds.

A Walk Round the Grid

Start at the Barberà del Vallès Rodalies station (R4 line, 20 min from Plaça Catalunya). A concrete footbridge drops you onto Avinguda de la Serra, the main spine. From here every street is numbered, not named: c/ 1, c/ 2, up to c/ 14, intersected by lateral letters A to K. The symmetry is almost soothing—until you realise the layout funnels traffic noise into every corner. Give it ten minutes and you’ll understand why locals call the place “the waffle iron”.

The only break in the pattern is Plaça Primer de Maig, a square of benches and pollarded plane trees wedged between blocks D and E. On weekdays elderly men play cards under the pergola; at weekends Pakistani families grill kebabs on disposable barbecues while kids chase footballs across the tiles. There is no church, no town hall older than 1975, and definitely no arcaded plaça major. Instead, the Centre Cívic occupies the ground floor of block E-4. Pick up a leaflet (Spanish/Catalan only) and you’ll find the week’s offerings: Pilates at €4 a class, Castilian–Catalan language exchanges, and an exhibition of mobile-phone photos taken by secondary-school pupils. Drop in if you like; nobody will mind, but nobody will fuss over you either.

Where to Eat (and Where Not to)

Badia’s culinary scene is firmly functional. La Peineta on c/ de la Concòrdia does a three-course menú del día for €12: soup, grilled chicken with chips, and a slab of flan. The chicken arrives hotter and juicier than many a Barcelona tourist trap, but the wine list is “red or white”. For anything fancier you’ll need to leave town. Neighbouring Cerdanyola has Can Xalert, a Catalan bistro serving slow-cooked cap i pota (lamb-and-veg stew) at €18 a plate; the walk back uphill doubles as digestion time.

Self-caterers head to the Mercadona on Avinguda de la Serra. British staples are limited—no Tetley tea, no cheddar—but you’ll find digestives and baked beans tucked beside the Mexican salsa, proof that someone here once flew easyJet.

The 360-Degree View

Climb the outdoor staircase of block K-11 (open access, no security) and you reach the nearest thing Badia has to a mirador. North-east, the scarred limestone of the Serra de Galliners rises to 450 m; south-west, the C-58 motorway glints like a sluggish river toward Barcelona. Directly below, identical balconies bristle with satellite dishes and drying T-shirts. It’s not a vista that sells postcards, yet it explains modern Catalonia more honestly than the Ramblas ever could: rapid immigration, urgent house-building, the pact between industry and labour that powers the regional economy.

If you need greenery, the Parc de Can Peixauet is 25 min on foot across the railway tracks. Joggers loop its 2 km perimeter path; dog-walkers congregate by the artificial lake. On Sunday mornings a volunteer group hands out free saplings to anyone who’ll plant them—turn up early and you can leave with a Mediterranean hackberry in a yoghurt pot.

Timing Your Visit

Badia makes sense only as a base, never a destination. Arrive Friday evening, check into the Hotel Ciutat de Montcada (three-star, €70 room-only, 3 km north), then take the train into Barcelona for dinner. Saturday morning, explore the grid before the sun hits the concrete at 11 a.m.; by noon temperatures on the open walkways reach 34 °C in July. Late afternoon ride the FGC suburban line to Sabadell (15 min) to see the modernista textile mansions. Back in Badia by 20:00, you’ll catch the Festa Major street disco if it’s late June—salsa beats echoing off the high-rises, draught beer at €2 a plastic cup. Winter visitors swap heat for damp: the Vallès basin traps fog, so expect visibility down to 50 m and neighbours who haven’t seen the mountains for a week.

Why Come at All?

Because sometimes the most revealing corner of a country is the one that never made the brochure. Badia won’t give you tiled roofs or vine-covered courtyards; instead it offers a crash course in how millions of southern Europeans actually live—stacked, time-poor, resourceful, neighbourly. Spend 24 hours here and Barcelona’s frantic tourism feels even more surreal when you return.

Just remember the last train. Miss it, and the waffle iron locks its gates until morning.