Barcelona's El Prat airfield opened in 1918, replacing an earlier site at El Remolar that had no room to grow. The first aircraft to land was a Latécoère Salmson 300 arriving from Toulouse en route to Casablanca. Scheduled commercial service began in 1927, when Iberia launched a route to Madrid, the airline's very first. That connection between Barcelona and the Spanish capital would later evolve into the Puente Aéreo shuttle, for a time the world's busiest air route by number of operations.

The 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics triggered the airport's first major modern expansion: new terminals, jetways, and upgraded infrastructure to absorb a surge in international traffic. Growth stalled again after 1999 before accelerating sharply through the 2000s. A third runway opened in September 2004, and in June 2009 the landmark Terminal 1, designed by architect Ricardo Bofill, was inaugurated, covering 548,000 square metres and giving the airport capacity for 55 million passengers annually. Today, BCN operates 2 terminals and 3 runways, and in 2025 it handled a record 57,483,036 passengers, ranking among the seven busiest airports in Europe.

Geographically, BCN sits on the western Mediterranean coast, connecting Catalonia to destinations across Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia. It is a hub for Vueling and Level, and a focus city for Air Europa, Iberia, EasyJet, and Ryanair. On February 1, 2014, it became the first Spanish airport to receive daily Airbus A380-800 service, when Emirates launched its Dubai route, a milestone that signalled BCN's arrival as a serious intercontinental hub. The airport takes its current name from Josep Tarradellas, the first president of the restored Generalitat de Catalunya, a renaming formalised in 2019.