The Church creates a website to help recover tourism in Barcelona

The new portal offers the visitor information on both the patrimony and the existing religious services. Before the pandemic, ecclesiastical heritage was the main tourist tractor in Barcelona

The Church of Barcelona, through the Secretariat for pastoral of Tourism, Pilgrimages and Shrines, has created the website www.turismereligios.barcelona , a pastoral tool that places its cultural patrimony at the service of the recovery of the tourism sector in the diocese.

The new portal, created to promote experience and access to information for tourists and for civil entities that promote tourism, offers many services. Among them, it facilitates the location and promotion of visits to diocesan temples as important as the Basilica of the Sagrada Familia or the main religious events and their traditions in Barcelona. It also promotes the common entrances to visit different temples

It also shows the schedules of the international masses in the basilica of the Sagrada Familia (now suspended due to the pandemic) and Santa María del Mar. Or the celebrations in emblematic churches of the diocese such as the Cathedral, Sagrada Familia, Tibidabo, the basilica of Santa María de Mataró, and the basilica of the Holy Mary La Mercè, the Virgin patron of Barcelona. Also the Barcelona parishes on will be celebrated Sunday masses in: English, Italian, French, German, Ukrainian, Polish, Portuguese, Chinese and Tagalog.

Finally, you can find information on religious accommodation and monastic lodgings for groups of pilgrims, organ concert cycles, polyphonic masses or an agile pilgrimage search engine with all the necessary information to decide the destination and time when you want to go on pilgrimage.

The ecclesiastical heritage, the main tourist asset

Before the pandemic, 1 in 3 tourists who visited the monuments and places of interest in Barcelona opted for the ecclesiastical heritage of the city, with a total of more than 8 million annual visits out of a total of 25.7 million. This configured this monumental heritage as the most important tourist asset, followed by museums (with 6.5 million) and by places of interest such as Park Güell (3.1), Casa Batlló or La Pedrera. Of the first 3 places with the most influx of visitors to the city, the first and third were temples: the Sagrada Familia and the Cathedral.

According to Mn. Josep Maria Turull, director of the Office form pastoral  for Tourism, Pilgrimages and Sanctuaries of the Archdiocese of Barcelona,  «in these difficult times, the Church of Barcelona has to help society, in the people of God, with all the tools that we have. And this website, where you can see all the cultural and cultural heritage that the Church of Barcelona offers, is put at the service of everyone, but especially the tourist and economic sector of the diocese to help its recovery. We trust that our tangible and intangible heritage will serve the mobilizing and unifying capacity of the people of God».