Barcelona's El Prat airport traces its origins to 1918, when a new airfield on the Llobregat delta replaced an earlier site at El Remolar that had opened in 1916. Scheduled commercial service began in 1927, when Iberia launched a route to Madrid, the airline's very first. The airport reached 1 million annual passengers in 1963. By 1970, Pan American Airways was operating Boeing 747 service between BCN and New York. In 1974, Iberia launched its Barcelona-Madrid air shuttle, a route that would become one of the world's busiest for decades.

The 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics brought the airport's first major transformation. Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura expanded and modernized the terminal complex, doubling capacity from roughly 6 million to 12 million passengers per year. The resulting buildings, now Terminal 2A and 2C, included an interior kilometer-long retail street dubbed 'Las Ramblas,' with palm trees in the central hall as a nod to the Mediterranean setting. A third runway opened in 2004, and on June 17, 2009, Terminal 1 came into service, a Bofill-designed structure covering 545,000 square meters, with a sword-shaped glass facade that floods public spaces with natural light and offers views across the runways to the sea.

Today BCN sits 15 kilometers southwest of central Barcelona, in the municipalities of El Prat de Llobregat, Viladecans, and Sant Boi. It is a hub for Vueling and Level, and a focus city for Iberia, Air Europa, easyJet, and Ryanair. In 2014, the airport became the first in Spain to receive a scheduled daily Airbus A380 service, operated by Emirates to Dubai. The airport was renamed Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat in December 2018, honoring the first president of Catalonia's restored regional government. Pre-pandemic, it handled over 52 million passengers annually.