The most popular of Barcelona on Instagram

Gaudí and some of his most emblematic architectural works, such as the Sagrada Familia, Park Güelll, CCasa Batlló or La Pedrera, are among the most mentioned tourist attractions by Instagram users who publish content in English about Barcelona.

This is indicated by a study carried out in recent months by Eurecat, the Technological Center of Catalonia, thanks to a deep learning project led by Raúl Gómez, a researcher at the Multimedia Technologies Unit of this center.

The main objective of this project is “to discover what words and images relate Instagram users to Barcelona and any other concept” added. For example, with Barcelona and culture, or Barcelona and fun, or Barcelona and food.

The project, which is still under development, was initially presented a few months ago during the sixth edition of the Turistic Forum. To carry out the study, more than one million images published on Instagram were analyzed during the last four months of 2017 and the first months of 2018.

The study reveals which are the tourist attractions or the most cited places. In the case of publications made in English, in addition to the references already mentioned to the architecture of Gaudí, the Camp Nou, Tibidabo, Barri Gòtic and La Rambla are also in the first places of the ranking.

The other popular terms refer to neighborhoods in Barcelona – Barceloneta, Gràcia, Eixample or Poblenou – and other nearby destinations, such as Sitges or Montserrat.

In addition to the places, the Eurecat project analyzes all the words linked to Barcelona based on the publications made by Instagram users.

In the case of publications made in English, the data provided to The New Barcelona Post by the person responsible for the project, Raúl Gómez, show that the ten most mentioned words are, in this order, “Spain“, “travel“, “love“, “photography“, “Catalunya“, “art“, “architecture“, “beautiful“, “city” and “Happy“.

Among the list of the 50 most frequent words are also “fashion“, “Gaudí“, “friends” or “beach“. And, in addition to the architect Antoni Gaudí, the only other person that appears on the list is Barça footballer, Leo Messi.

The Eurecat project includes two tools. The first, called TextNet, is responsible for analyzing all the available text and learns relationships between words. The second, called VisualNet, “learns to extract information from the images that relate them to the representation of the language learned by TextNet”, as explained in the presentation of the project.