Barcelona faces Sant Jordi 2026 with a forecast of a record number of stalls, publishers, and spaces dedicated to books, with 15 days to go until the celebration. The president of the Booksellers' Guild of Catalonia, Eric del Arco, has announced that the Catalan capital will have a dozen professional spaces distributed across seven districts.
More presence of the book sector in the city
Del Arco has attributed this growth to the increase in publishers present at the event and has linked it to the opening of new bookstores in Barcelona. "The bookselling sector is rising in Barcelona, which indicates to us that the city is a creative hub for books", has stated the president of the Booksellers' Guild of Catalonia.
The forecast draws an edition of great deployment in different points of the city, with a wider network of professional spaces to absorb the activity of one of the most intense commercial and cultural days of the Barcelona calendar.
La Rambla is out due to the works
The main novelty of Sant Jordi 2026 will be the absence of book and rose stalls on La Rambla of Barcelona. The street will be outside the festival's arrangement due to the works that are still ongoing.
From the Booksellers' Guild they consider that the decision is justified. "Anyone who has passed through La Rambla in recent days will have noticed that it is unfeasible to set up the stalls there", Del Arco has maintained, who has also remarked that the festivity must be celebrated "in a safe environment".
The head of the union has framed this absence as "of a small impasse" of one year, awaiting the completion of the works. Meanwhile, Barcelona will reinforce the map of spaces distributed across seven districts to sustain an edition that the sector foresees as especially powerful and with more professional presence than ever.