Barcelona christmas lights

Bringing the warmth from home into the streets

Since 1950, Barcelona has held a tradition of illuminating their main streets as part of the Christmas festivities.

As part of a public competition, we got selected to design the Christmas lights for Aragó street, one of Barcelona’s widest and longest arteries, spanning more than five kilometers across the city.

Ever since the first illuminated street in 1957, Barcelona’s Christmas lights have become a defining local tradition.

In recent years, Barcelona has increasingly struggled to stay connected to its own citizens. Globalization, mass tourism, and the rise of generic “international” imagery have diluted many of the city’s everyday rituals — those small, domestic customs that once shaped how locals lived and celebrated.

Christmas lights, traditionally an opportunity to express cultural identity, had slowly fallen into predictable patterns: decorative motifs, generic icons, or overly festive clichés such as “Merry Christmas” or “Happy New Year.”

Our proposal seeks to shift that narrative.

Through the use of everyday phrases and humor, we aim to create an emotional connection with locals, reviving the Catalan oral tradition of Christmas from a contemporary and accessible perspective.

The phrases follow the natural rhythm of the festive calendar: asking if you’re coming home for Christmas, wondering about New Year’s plans, debating who will bring the Cava, or reminding children to go sleep early because the Three Kings are on their way.

To move away from the typical aesthetics associated to Christmas lights, we designed the phrases as large-scale horizontal banners suspended rhythmically across the avenue. Their scale, chromatic and typographic expression break from traditional illuminated ornaments, instead embracing a more civic, urban, and direct language.

The messages, normally focused towards younger audiences and the collective Christmas imaginary, seek to also connect with adults.

The lights had to be legible from afar by vehicles, pedestrians and neighbors all at the same time.

The solution was a system of angled panels that equally ensured visibility for drivers and pedestrians while accommodating the structural constraints of the street.