Spain ’92 / A Medal Year : Environment : Barcelona Reinvents Itself to Host the World : The Mediterranean city dazzles the eye with new beaches, a seaside Olympic Village, a striking new airport and new parks.

It is not so long since beach-goers from Barcelona braved long rides and intractable traffic getting out of town.

Nowadays, Deputy Mayor Joan Clos enjoys watching neighbors in clogs and towels catch the subway heading into town for a swim. Architect Josep Martorell goes often. The water may not be pristine, but he says it’s not bad: “I can see my toes without my glasses.”

Olympic host Barcelona greets the world next week as a city reinvented, a Mediterranean metropolis for the first time firmly facing the sea.

The turnabout is the fulcrum of an audacious and expensive civic overhaul through which Barcelona has transmuted a world athletic fiesta into a ringing celebration of self: a five-ringed Renaissance. The first medal of the Games goes to the host.

Barcelona dazzles: new beaches, a seaside Olympic Village, highways and a time-saving tunnel, new parks and plazas, hillside stadia, a redone train terminal, a new airport with palm trees in the lobby.

“The Games have been a catalyst for many things that have been waiting too long to be done. We had a lot of time to think about them, and--finally--the chance to carry them out. Now, I think we are showing that we can maintain cities that are pleasant to live in,” said Pasqual Maragall, president of the Olympic Organizing Committee.

Maragall, a 51-year-old economist-city planner, holds a master’s from the New School for Social Research in New York, taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and since 1982 has been Barcelona’s Socialist mayor.

He masterminded Barcelona’s winning bid for the Games against Paris in 1986 and has overseen change by the bushel ever since. At one point there were 350 projects under way simultaneously, ranging from sculpture-enhanced new plazas to a beltway that is underground for most of its circuit around the city.

The work knotted the city with traffic, and noise drove its residents to distraction for five years while people wondered if the tumult would ever end. It’s over now, and the sum of the work is not only a new Barcelona but also an object lesson to other cities seeking face lifts.

Seville in southern Spain has been overhauled in a hurry because it is the site of a world’s fair this summer as part of Spain’s celebration of the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage west.

One goal of the Spanish government modernization of Seville was to yank the poorer Andalusia region up to the levels of the rest of the country. In Barcelona, too, rebirth goes beyond the Games.

“Barcelona can now compete favorably with the rest of Europe. It can think about being the capital of the Mediterranean in the new Europe,” said Santiago Roldan, head of the government-sponsored holding company created to build the Olympics infrastructure.

Thanks to the XXV Olympiad, Barcelona has more new jewels in its crown: the graceful 2,000-apartment Olympic Village, the rebuilt 65,000-seat Montjuic Stadium on a hill majestically overlooking the city and a new, multipurpose indoor sports arena nearby. Montjuic has been tied to the city with new parks, roads and escalators.

All the Olympic preparations have “radically changed the physical form of Barcelona,” concludes Robert Hughes in his new book, “Barcelona,” a probing lover’s profile of a port that was once one of Europe’s great cities--and is again.

The trendy combination of born-again Barcelona and an overvalued Spanish peseta will quickly drain the deepest Olympic purse.

The people of Barcelona are feeling the pinch, too. There is palpable civic pride in the city’s new image--93% of recent callers to one radio show said they like what they see--but no end of grass-roots griping at the cost. Like everywhere else in Spain, progress costs money. Taxes are up across the board.

“An Olympics, great. But it would take two or three Olympics to make up for the pressure from new taxes. I think many businesses will have to close,” said bookshop owner Jose Morales.

In all, Olympic events have been scattered in 14 different sites around a metropolitan area of 3.7 million stitched together just in time by 24.8 miles of new highways--most of them part of a beltway that has reduced traffic in the center of town by 15%. In circling the city with the new road, planners thought green: Barcelona’s parkland has increased by 40%, partly because, with the beltway underground, the surface is devoted to open spaces.

“There has been an enormous impact on the city. The quality of life is way up. And we have recovered our pride, shown we are capable of organizing well, but doing it our way, a la espanola ,” said Barcelona booster Pedro Palacios, a local journalist who will oversee 11,000 international journalists as Olympics press chief.

The new look comes with an architectural flair for which the city is famous. New Olympic structures are as striking in their way as the turn-of-the-century buildings that make Barcelona a pedestrian’s joy. The outdoor cafes, the strollers and the street musicians are integral parts of the cityscape--round-the-clock.

“Journalists at the Seoul Olympics who wanted a beer after finishing work near midnight had to go back to their hotel rooms. Here, life has hardly started at midnight,” said Palacios.

Planners could have used the central 115,000-seat stadium that is the home of the city’s European champion soccer team as the main Olympic venue. Instead, they chose to redo smaller, hilltop Montjuic, built in 1929 for an unsuccessful 1936 Olympic bid--because it carries a message.

Like most people in Barcelona, Deputy Mayor Clos, who is also a medical doctor, knows that Catalan Republicans were executed on the hill in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. Forces of dictator Francisco Franco won that war. He ruled Spain until he died in 1975, hating liberal, dissident Barcelona all the way.

“How better to relaunch the city than to take a place of which we were ashamed and make it honorable, a kind of athletic Acropolis,” said Clos.

There was once a Roman temple atop Montjuic, and the guardian hill-mountain remained a symbol of the city as Barcelona matured during the Industrial Age and the 20th Century into Spain’s most dynamic and sophisticated metropolis.

Last century, economist Ferran Brunet notes, Barcelona was home to 90% of the country’s industry. Now, overtaken in recent decades by Madrid, the metropolitan area generates almost 30% of national industrial production and Barcelona has become what Brunet calls “a tertiary city, the office for factories that have moved into nearby provinces.”

Beginning with the 1973 oil crisis, Barcelona seemed to lose its way. It became a decaying city, trapped between dying factories on its seafront and mountains at its back. In 1982, a local newspaper columnist compared Barcelona to the liner Titanic.

“The Games have refloated the ship,” said Clos.

For Maragall and planners trying patiently to revive and restore a city with its own resources, the Olympics represented an $8-billion windfall administered by the holding company headed by Roldan to oversee construction.

Nearly half the new investment was private, and of the total, only about 11% was spent on athletic facilities. The rest went to infrastructure where it counts, creating at least 70,000 jobs and a new city.

“Virtually everything that has been done will have strong immediate social use for the people of the city after the Games are over,” Roldan said in an interview.

The planning decision on which all subsequent ones would hinge was where to build the Olympic Village to house the record 15,000 athletes coming to compete.

“We decided to put the Olympic Village in the city and not in the countryside. That meant we also had to build a beltway around the city,” said Clos. And spend millions on new sewers, telephone lines and other underground projects.

Planners looked to the heart of the city for the Olympic Village, a 250-acre plot by the sea that was central but isolated--cut off from downtown Barcelona by a ring of obsolete factories and two rail lines.

“You couldn’t get there from Barcelona. It was a plug between the city and the sea. The factories could be demolished, but we had to be careful with the tracks. If we replaced them with a road, nothing was gained. So we put the tracks and the road underground,” said architect Martorell, whose firm helped design the plan.

“The impact is not in the size of the work, but in the circumstances. The Village was a catalyst. First there was one kilometer of new beach, and now there are five kilometers,” he said.

Rising along the new waterfront are two 42-story towers, a hotel and an office block, built by private investors. A major new yacht harbor is in the works. Thus, in the name of sport, Barcelona has not only made a friend of the sea but also gained a major new piece of itself. Once the athletes have left, Roldan’s company will sell the apartments and shops in the villages.

One recent weekend, officials threw open the Village to visits by townsfolk: 700,000 turned up in two days.

“I think what the people saw was that the Village is not something alien to the city but rather that their city has grown, and in the process conquered the sea,” said Martorell.