The tourists come for Gaudí. They photograph the Sagrada Família’s spires and the tiled lizards of Park Güell, and they leave. A growing number of scientists come too, and they stay. In laboratories, hospital towers and a new campus rising near Girona, a workforce assembled from dozens of countries is at work on Barcelona’s next masterpiece, one measured in molecules rather than stone.
They are building on ground three generations deep. One firm here, Uriach, has made medicines since 1838. Another, AstraZeneca, is filling one of its largest research centres anywhere. A third, SpliceBio, did not exist a decade ago and has just raised the biggest round in the history of Spanish biotech. Same region, three very different companies, all betting on the same ground.
Catalonia has become a place that old and new, foreign and homegrown, all choose at once. It is one of a handful of European clusters now competing for the same companies, capital and talent. Two questions follow. What pulls them all to the same ground, and what keeps them there? Jordi Ortiz, who lands international companies for the regional agency Catalonia Trade and Investment, answers the first without pausing for breath.