Tiana was Barcelona’s escape before escaping Barcelona became a trend

Long before people started searching for gardens, space and a quieter life outside Barcelona, families from the city were already heading to Tiana.

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, wealthy Barcelona families were building second homes here and spending their summers in the village. In fact, Tiana’s relationship with Barcelona goes back even further. Municipal records note Barcelona citizens owning houses in Tiana as early as the 16th century.

More than a century later, the reasons are surprisingly familiar. People wanted fresh air, space, a slower pace and somewhere close enough to Barcelona that the city never felt very far away.

From summer house to permanent home

What began as a summer destination gradually shaped the town itself.

The arrival of the Barcelona to Mataró railway in 1848 made Tiana easier to reach, and the number of summer residents increased. By the end of the 19th century, new streets and residential areas were being created partly for Barcelona families spending their summers in the village. The growth was significant enough that the summer community established its own social life, including what became known as the Casino dels Forasters.

Today, the pattern has almost reversed. What was once somewhere people escaped to for a few months is increasingly the kind of place buyers consider for their everyday life.

The second home becomes the main home.

The weekend garden becomes the garden you use every day.

And Barcelona becomes somewhere you travel into rather than somewhere you need to live.

You can still see that history in the property market

One of the things that makes Tiana interesting today is that its housing stock reflects different periods of that evolution.

There are older village properties, traditional masies, homes connected with the town’s period as a summer retreat and more modern residential development that arrived as Tiana expanded during the 20th century.

That makes buying here quite different from choosing an apartment in a more uniform urban market.

You are often buying into a particular piece of the town’s history as much as a number of bedrooms and square metres.

The reasons people came have not changed that much

The language has changed.

Today we talk about work life balance, hybrid working, outdoor space and quality of life.

A century ago they simply called it spending the summer in Tiana.

But the attraction is remarkably similar.

Tiana offered Barcelona families distance from the city without complete separation from it. It still does.

That may explain why the town can feel strangely familiar to buyers leaving Barcelona today. They are following a route people from the city have been taking for generations.

Maybe Tiana was ahead of the curve

There is a tendency to think the move from Barcelona towards the Maresme is something new.

In Tiana, it really is not.

Barcelona families have been choosing the town as an escape for hundreds of years, and its growth in the 19th and 20th centuries was closely connected with that relationship.

The difference is that today many buyers are no longer looking for somewhere to spend August.

They are looking for somewhere to spend their life.