Barcelona has more than 6,000 empty shop units — 89 buildings with three or more of them — and a fifth of the offices in its 22@ district standing empty, while the city gives public plots on long surface rights to cooperatives through the ESAL agreement and now buys boarded-up buildings itself. The Generalitat's own inventory names public buildings without any use, such as the former UOC headquarters on Avinguda del Tibidabo.
Vacant office space705,600 m²8.4% of the stock stands empty
On the map7,711buildings and sites from 12 open sources
Homes potential≈ 2,682if 30% of empty offices converted
Office figures: JLL, first half of 2026 — 8.4 million m² of offices, 8.4% available (vacant area = stock × rate, an estimate). Savills puts the city at 10.2% and the 22@ district at 20.5%.. Homes: our economic model’s conversion engine. Map built 2026-10-06.
Switch layers on by the question you are asking. Every point comes from a public record, an open dataset or a cited report; open one to see where it comes from and what the data cannot tell us.
Barcelona publishes no open list of empty whole buildings; the Generalitat's register of empty dwellings owned by banks and large holders is not open at address level.
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0 points · click a cluster to zoom, a point for its sources
Where to look first
Buildings with evidence that they stand empty — a second source agrees, a public record names them, or we have checked them — ranked by a score you can read: co-op scale, daylight depth, a station nearby, a zone that allows homes, affordable land and an open route in. Checked buildings carry their result; nobody has visited them on site yet.
Score
Building
Floor area
Station
Actions
73
Avenida Litoral, 34
Public building named vacant · Edificio · 1 other source nearby
6,968 m²
319 m
73
Carrer de la Marina, 16-18
Public building named vacant · Edificio · 2 other sources nearby
3,993 m²
320 m
73
retail building, cadastral ref. 1022313DF3812C
Distressed or stranded (named) · retail · 5 other sources nearby
Distressed or stranded (named) · residential · 3 other sources nearby
3,425 m²
224 m
Districts where conversion makes sense
Where empty offices, the right zoning and a working neighbourhood come together — and what could go wrong.
22@ and Poblenou (Sant Martí)
The innovation district has the city's highest office vacancy, ten sectors still waiting for their detailed plans, and a cooperative plot already assigned on Carrer de Tànger.
22@ office availability 20.48% (Savills, H1 2026)
CBRE estimates 8,400 homes if the remaining tertiary land were rezoned
730 empty ground-floor premises in Sant Martí (2023–24 census)
Risk: Land is in many private hands and the 2023 plan change that added 3,300 homes has seen only 370 started; new office supply keeps arriving.
The district with the most empty ground-floor premises, in deep nineteenth-century blocks where whole-building reactivation, not new land, is the main route.
A public plot without use at Carrer de Provença 164 (Hospital Clínic)
1,224 empty ground-floor premises, the most of any district (2023–24 census)
Risk: Among the highest values in the city; whole empty buildings are rarely on the market.
Former industrial land under transformation, with the largest residential floor area still waiting for detailed plans and a municipal plot in the 2026 affordable-rental tender.
Three pending transformation sectors with about 20,000, 40,000 and 20,000 m² of residential floor area
Included in the March 2026 tender for 625 affordable rental flats on five municipal plots
Risk: Mostly new building on cleared industrial land, far from transit until new lines arrive.
The city is moving 700 staff into a refurbished building on Via Laietana to free its own offices on Avinyó, Ciutat and Paradís streets for about 70 protected homes — a direct office-to-housing conversion by a public owner.
About 70 protected homes planned in freed municipal offices
636 empty ground-floor premises (2023–24 census)
Risk: Small, listed buildings in a tourist-pressured centre; the first staff move only from mid-2026.
Who controls the space, and what a housing cooperative can actually do with them.
Allocation rule
Ajuntament de Barcelona / IMHAB — ESAL framework agreement
The city assigns surface rights on municipal plots and buildings to non-profit bodies, including cohousing cooperatives in use-rights tenure; in February 2026 two more plots went to Cooperativa Vida Inclusiva and Cooperativa La 111. Join or partner with a federation member to be in the next round, and ask for existing buildings to rehabilitate, as in 2022 at Passeig de Torras i Bages 126-128.
Ajuntament de Barcelona — surface-right tenders for affordable rent
In March 2026 the city tendered five municipal plots for 625 affordable rental flats on 50–75-year surface rights, open to private developers and non-profit bodies; after the term the buildings become municipal.
The city buys whole empty buildings, including by pre-emption at judicial auctions (Passatge d'Alió 21, 2025) under its plan to buy 1,500 flats. Point IMHAB to stuck empty buildings you find on the radar and propose cooperative management after rehabilitation.
Generalitat de Catalunya — Direcció General del Patrimoni
The open inventory of Generalitat property lists buildings and plots without use in Barcelona — the former UOC headquarters on Avinguda del Tibidabo, the old Ports offices on Carrer del Doctor Roux, railway surplus land. Ask the Generalitat for a surface right or concession on a named property.
With a fifth of 22@ office space available and brokers pushing to rezone tertiary land for housing, owners of older or half-empty 22@ buildings are potential partners for a cooperative conversion once the remaining PMU plans are approved.
Five municipal plots (Provençals del Poblenou, Marina del Prat Vermell, Sant Andreu, Diagonal Mar) offered on 50–75-year surface rights to developers and non-profits.
14 sources connected, 1 waiting for access. We only use data we may lawfully reuse; where a publisher blocks automated access we do not work around it — a person downloads it, or we ask for permission.
Show every source, its licence and when we last read it
Shown while we ask Leerstandsmelder for permission. Reports since 2016 only, with the address, the month reported and a link to each entry; not checked by EHC. From a one-time copy of 4 October 2026 — the API is not fetched, as it disallows automated agents.
Asking for permission
0
Pending
2026-10-06
Credited to Leerstandsmelder.de; asking for permission
Ajuntament de Barcelona — Transparència, inventari i operacions patrimonials (31 Dec 2022)
Manual download
57
Snapshot
2022
Public transparency information, Ajuntament de Barcelona (credited)
What this radar cannot see yet
Barcelona publishes no open list of empty whole buildings; the Generalitat's register of empty dwellings owned by banks and large holders is not open at address level.
The census of ground-floor premises records single units, was last surveyed in 2023–2024 and is marked discontinued.
The Spanish cadastre's building condition (790 declined, 20 ruined buildings in Barcelona, August 2026) is only available as a bulk download, and 'declined' does not mean empty — one declined office building on Via Laietana is a trade union's headquarters.
The Generalitat's property inventory gives addresses but no coordinates, so it is used here only for named sites.
The City Council's main website disallows AI agents in robots.txt, so municipal press releases and the transparency portal were not read; facts come from the official gazette, open data and the press.
Wikidata's query service disallows automated queries in robots.txt, so no Wikidata layer is included.
Know an empty building we have missed?
Open data cannot see everything. Tell us about a building in Barcelona that stands empty or barely used; once we have checked it, it joins the map under “Reported by visitors (checked)”.
