Coworking in Barcelona

Once a former dairy, La Vaca (“the cow”) is now a creative coworking space in Barcelona’s Poble Sec neighborhood. The bright interior is filled with natural light and equipped with spacious desks, comfy seats, soundproof phone booths and a dedicated room for meetings.

The bustling space also features a self-service kitchen where coworkers can snag a free coffee and chat with fellow Vaqueros. La Vaca’s basement houses additional workstations plus a few chill out areas. What would a coworking be without ping pong, a pool table and video came console for those little, creative breaks?

The community is active with a friendly vibe. To bring coworkers together, foster a sense of community and help members grow, La Vaca organize many activities and events such as bootcamps, fitness meetups (stretching, running, hiking, yoga), sports activities (football, beach volleyball), Paella Day, artistic afterworks and more…

Membership includes free wifi, water, tea & coffee; access to events, meeting room (8 people), 2 Skype rooms, kitchen, lockers; use of printer, scanner, 3 projectors; fingerprint access; reception of packages. Air conditioning / heating. Dog friendly.

Tools. Materials. Machines. Innovation. TMDC is a coworking space dedicated to makers, and a space where you can turn your sketches into reality. Located in Sant Martí, the former industrial warehouse district that’s become the city’s hub for innovation startups, TMDC provides assistance in making and the tools and machines to do so, including Wera and Festool.

The creative coworking workshop also provides wood, plastic and other materials to manifest your ideas. Whether you’re a newbie or a professional, an architect, designer, or an artisan, all are welcome to take courses in learning how to use the machines. If you’re a master, you’re also welcome to teach your own workshop.

TMDC offers a pay-per-use system, and before you do, you can make an appointment to view the workshop. If you’re planning on practically living at the space, consider applying for their residency program, RMDC. And students receive a 10% discount on all courses and memberships!

Every good hotel needs a living room, and Libertine is Casa Bonay’s – the ground-floor lounge of a restored 1869 neoclassical townhouse on Gran Via, where dim lighting, gothic flowers and vintage furniture lend an autumnal calm at any hour. Tables sit well apart, made for conversations you’d rather keep private, and a dark wood bar runs the length of the room under money-green neon.

The cocktails are the reason to cross town: American bar consultant Eric Stephenson writes the menu, which wanders from aperitivos and sours through fizzes to a section literally titled tropical and mysterious – form enough to earn the bar its 50 Best Discovery listing. In 2024 the team canned the house style as Libertine Blends, a line of ready-to-drink cocktails born behind this bar. Alongside run natural wines, highballs and snacks borrowed from sibling Bodega Bonay – fried artichokes, chicken croquettes, tempura sardines.

The room works the full day, and daylight hours belong as much to laptops as to lunch – it’s a favorite spot for free coworking, with side tables where you’re welcome to set up, free wifi and power plugs at hand. Then from Thursday to Saturday local DJs take over with vinyl sets that push the lobby deep into the night.

The explosion of coworking spaces marks a new era for working in the city. In Poblenou, a neighborhood well-known for creativity and innovation, The Folio Club has expanded its roster to invite creative professionals seeking a shared space to work.

The Folio Club has supported artists with its personal approach to graphic projects since opening its doors in 2014, when it was conceived as a printing and exhibition space. Housed in a renovated, 250 m2 flour factory dating back to 1900, architect and designer Skye Maunsell (Pasaje Montoya) has reimagined the space with references to the mechanical printing process and minimal, modular forms, like those by Richard Serra.

And now the additional space available to creative professionals will enable The Folio Club to encourage synergies and strengthen the creative ecosystem on an even grander scale.

Makers of Barcelona began life in 2011 with 40 members united under a vision of Barcelona as a global hub for innovation and creativity. Today over 300 members roam its converted textile factory in Eixample, a coworking space and platform for the testing, prototyping and marketing of projects all under one roof.

Make that two roofs, because the community’s growth has entailed an expansion to a second space in Sant Antoni, MOB&PAU. Mobile and fixed desks, meeting rooms, chillout areas and a cooking lab combining creativity, technology and gastronomy are among the amenities offered. Planned future events include 3D Feast, the world’s first public digital gastronomy dinner, and the OuiShare Fest celebrating the collaborative economy.

The new facility upholds MOB’s aim of building communities of “creative and restless minds that can’t stop making” and providing them with the talent, tools and resources to innovate together.

A garden full of talent. That sounds like a great place to work. Talent Garden was founded in Italy as a community and space to accelerate and celebrate digital innovation. Their motto is “live, learn and share.”

TAG welcomes talented individuals, entrepreneurs, investors, companies and creators. Barcelona’s new TAG coworking space opened its doors in March on Muntaner just above Diagonal. Here “taggers” sit on stylishly designed cardboard furniture surrounded by artificial grass, trees and animals. Boxes with glass walls in the center of the space are ideal for meetings. Taggers select subscription levels depending on their needs: a fixed desk, flexible seating or an evening plan for creatives who are active when everybody else is asleep.

One of the advantages Talent Gardens offers is its international network, with a strong presence in Italy and new spaces in Lithuania, Albania, Luxembourg and New York with plans for more.

Plenty of coworking spaces talk about sustainability; Apocapoc built its whole identity on it. Founded in 2013 by a documentary filmmaker, a tech entrepreneur and a motion-graphics designer – Valérie, Fabien and Sébastien – Barcelona’s first green coworking opened in a converted grain factory in El Born, with cork-insulated floors and furniture pieced together from recovered wood and reworked metal. The name announced the method: a poc a poc means “little by little” in Catalan.

Little by little turned out to mean something much bigger. In 2017 the founders scaled the experiment into Nest City Lab, an old foundry in Poblenou’s 22@ district – the heart of the city’s former factory belt – rebuilt to LEED Platinum standard, salvaging what the building could give, down to the industrial bridge crane that did the heavy lifting during construction. The name on the door has changed; the ethos hasn’t.

The space hosts around 170 coworkers – freelancers, craft entrepreneurs and small companies chosen, as ever, to fit the project – alongside some 400 square meters of urban permaculture. A fig tree anchors the edible forest in the central atrium, an urban farm grows greens on aeroponic towers, and there’s a vegetarian kitchen, a media center and rooms for yoga and mindfulness. The calendar runs from permaculture design courses to talks on regenerative cities.

They describe it as an urban laboratory for sustainability. Over a decade in, little by little is adding up.

Coworking spaces have been springing up across the city for a while now, but Pipoca is more of an inspiring, multicultural collaborative space than your average shared office. This is precisely what owner Afonso Portugal aimed for: a multi-use spot. It has certainly succeeded. Beyond just desks, Pipoca offers an art gallery, music room (with a piano), conference room, games room complete with a ping pong table, area for film screenings and a hammock in the chillout room for anyone in need of a siesta.

It’s location couldn’t be more stunning – set out across an entire floor of a spectacular building in the Barri Gòtic, with two internal terrace courtyards, traditional tiled floors and balconies. The rest of the décor is imaginative and modern, creating a stylish but relaxed atmosphere, perfect for the mixed use of the collective space. Named after the Portuguese word for “popcorn,” Pipoca is even home to a traditional popcorn maker.

So all the space needs now is to be filled with the creative talent of the city. Already some coworkers have gotten active, organizing events such as brunch, barbecues, workshops and exhibitions. Among its coworkers Pipoca aimes to create synergy, or “an effect greater than that of the sum of individual actions.”

With a space like this, with amazing areas for alternative shows and events, Pipoca is open to any form of reinterpretation, and a whole world of possibilities could emerge.

Let’s work together – that’s the idea behind Betahaus. Last year this coworking space for creative professionals and entrepreneurs opened its doors in an amazing six-floor building in Gràcia.

Just as in Berlin, where the first Betahaus was established in 2009, its members are an open-minded lot and form part of a strong Betahaus community. Some have a basic club membership with access during business hours; they rotate desks in the café downstairs. Others have a Fullhaus membership, with their own keys and a permanent desk. Fullhaus members meet, work or just hang out at anywhere, including on any the space’s five terraces. There are also events and even yoga classes.

Betahaus is a work in progress, so new memberships are currently available; curious mind are invited to join the community. Interested? Take the free Betahaus tour on Tuesdays and Thursdays.