Wandering the fashionable Passeig de Grácia, or sprawled on the beach under a Meditterranean sun, it is sometimes easy to forget that Barcelona city was once part of what is now its industrial hinterland.

Although long a centre of cultural and artistic endeavour, large sections of the Catalan capital were given over to mills, foundries and other factories throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th.