| Abstract: | The aim of this paper is to analyse the origins of the hotel industry dedicated to tourism in the city of Barcelona, one of the most important tourist centres in the western Mediterranean. From the 1888 Universal Exposition to the 1929 International Exposition, and even later, we find several initiatives to set in motion an incipient tourist system which was truncated by the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936. In this system, we will here focus on the hotel industry based on the fact that at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the majority of hotel establishments were not focused on tourism. It was only with the tourist development experienced by Barcelona during these decades that one can also speak of the birth of one of the most important tourism hotel offerings, both in Spain and Western Europe. |
