Currently, Sant Joan Despí has 31,438 inhabitants divided into 5 very disaggregated districts. It also has an industrial quarter.
Barri Centre Barri Centre (Catalan for
center quarter) is the original urban core of the town, formerly called
Nucli antic (
old town). The district is bounded by the railway, B-23 motorway,
Cornellà de Llobregat and by the new Eixample district towards the Llobregat River. It is full of Art Deco buildings, many of them designed by
Josep Maria Jujol who was the official town council architect from 1926. It also contains the oldest buildings of the town including Esglèsia de Sant Joan Batista (Saint John the Baptist Church) and a small medieval chapel. In the 1960s, this quarter was still a small set of cottages, where wealthy people from Barcelona spent their holidays, and small houses, but since then, urban spread has changed a lot substituting most of the houses with tall buildings and changing the green spaces into concrete parks. Nowadays you can still find some of the old small houses, and most of the singular ones but they are surrounded by modern buildings.
Les Planes is a district which appeared during the 1960s and the 1970s to house the incoming immigration from other Spanish regions especially Extremadura and Andalusia. is separated from the center quarter by the
Polígon Fontsanta industrial quarter and from the TV3 quarter by the
Parc Fontsanta park and indeed, it is urbanistically continuous just towards the
Padrò quarter of
Cornellà de Llobregat. This quarter is characterized by relatively tall buildings and narrow streets. Democratic councils have alleviated that by turning many of those streets into pedestrian streets.
Pla del Vent/Torreblanca This district is placed at the other side of the B-23 motorway and to east of the railway. It is closer to
Sant Feliu de Llobregat and
Sant Just Desvern. This district has two names because is the union of two older quarters. was a set of small houses along a road communicating Sant Joan towards
Sant Just Desvern. was a new urbanization built during the last half of the 1980s besides the monumental
Torreblanca Park which gave the name to the quarter. Later urbanizations joined both squares into a single district.
Residential Sant Joan (TV3) This district was urbanized at the mid 1980s after the building of the main studios of the Catalan autonomic television,
TV3, which is the reason why the quarter is popularly known as the 'TV3' quarter. It is a wealthy quarter surrounded by the large green zone called
Fontsanta park which connects it with the
Polígon Fontsanta and
Les Planes.
Eixample is a new quarter, being built since 1998, during the
real estate bubble in Spain, as an extension toward the
Llobregat river of the
Barri Centre.
Polígon Fontsanta Polígon Fontsanta is an industrial district which is in the geographic center of Sant Joan Despí. For many years, such polygon was the attracting factor for new population to the town, which explains why new quarters were built around it instead of around the old town. Important brands had their factories in the square including
Gallina Blanca,
San Miguel,
Trinaranjus... ==Transportation==