Barcelona: Path-Traced 3D City Map · Framed Matte Poster

Every building in this map is real. The volumes come from the Ajuntament de Barcelona's own 3D city model — 114,715 separately modelled bodies inside a two-kilometre disc, extruded onto the municipal survey's digital surface model, so every rooftop sits at a measured elevation to within 2.5 centimetres. Barcelona's roofs genuinely are flat, which is why a flat-topped model is the right one here. They stand on PNOA MDT02, Spain's two-metre national terrain model. The light is not a filter: the whole city was path traced, the same technique film studios use, with the shadows computed ray by ray from a sun standing 60° above the horizon.

No city in this series rewards an overhead view like Barcelona. Cerdà's Eixample fills the upper half as a perfect chamfered lattice, and at this sun angle every one of those clipped corners throws its own small shadow into the octagon of the crossing. Below it Ciutat Vella refuses the grid entirely — a medieval tangle running down to the port. Montjuïc lifts the south-west corner; at 142 metres of relief this is the steepest city here after Zurich. Every block casts the shadow its true height earns.

Printed on museum-quality matte paper in an Ayous wood frame.

Details

• 2 km radius around Plaça de Catalunya · 41.3851° N, 2.1734° E · EPSG:32631
• Buildings: 3D city model, Ajuntament de Barcelona, CC BY 4.0
• Terrain: PNOA MDT02 2 m, IGN · Base map © OpenStreetMap contributors
• Path-traced global illumination — real computed shadows, not hillshade
• Museum-quality matte paper, Ayous wood frame