We are the combination of four hospitals: the General Hospital, the Children’s Hospital, the Women’s Hospital and the Traumatology, Rehabilitation and Burns Hospital. We are part of the Vall d’Hebron Barcelona Hospital Campus: a world-leading health park where healthcare plays a crucial role.
Patients are the centre and the core of our system. We are professionals committed to quality care and our organizational structure breaks down the traditional boundaries between departments and professional groups, with an exclusive model of knowledge areas.
Would you like to know what your stay at Vall d'Hebron will be like? Here you will find all the information.
The commitment of Vall d'Hebron University Hospital to innovation allows us to be at the forefront of medicine, providing first class care adapted to the changing needs of each patient.
La Vanguardia made an extensive report on the day of the inauguration of the Hospital
Hospital's direction in 1959. Dr. Germán Garnacho, first manager of the Hospital, at the centre of the image
Office of Dr. Garnacho, manager of the Hospital, in 1955
In the early years, births were also attended at the Hospital. Photographs by Guillermo Moyano, a Montbau resident, provided by his daughter. The images were taken during the days his daughter was hospitalized after her birth.
Vall d’Hebron Hospital was built at the foot of the Collserola hills, on state-owned land, and was inaugurated on 5 October 1955 under the name Residencia Sanitaria Francisco Franco.
The hospital was built to provide care for Social Security beneficiaries from the cities of Barcelona, Badalona and L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, and for special clinical cases in the rest of the province. It was an 11-storey building with 764 beds. Construction of the hospital began in the late 1940s on the site where, during the Second Republic, a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients had been planned by architects Jose Lluís Sert, Josep Torres Clavé and Joan Baptista Subirana, which had been signed on the same day the Spanish Civil War was declared: 18 July 1936. The area had already been considered as a potential hospital site in the Urban Development Plan approved by the Commonwealth of Catalonia in 1917. The sanatorium was never built, but the Franco regime revived the project and expanded it to increase the hospital’s capacity to more than 700 beds. Few could have imagined that when the hospital was inaugurated with great fanfare, the project had such a different origin from the regime. When the hospital began operating, several groups lived on site, including the manager, Dr Germán Garnacho. Resident doctors, trainee nurses and a group of nuns also lived there. Together with the nurses, the nuns coordinated the services of the different hospital wards. The first years were not easy. The hospital operated mainly as an open surgical centre with no permanent staff. Its organisation was excessively centralised and bureaucratic, and it was a long way from the city centre. All this meant that, despite its imposing building and its resources, it could not compete with the other Barcelona hospitals.
The surgeons who operated at the new hospital would go there with their teams a couple of days a week. On the days they were scheduled to operate, they would also visit the inpatients. Outpatient consultations were carried out at the health centres. The rest of the time, patients were under the care of five on-call doctors who provided 24-hour cover. During the 1950s, and until the Children’s Hospital was inaugurated in 1966, births were also attended at the centre. By contrast, patients with infectious diseases or mental illnesses were neither treated nor admitted.
The Residencia Sanitaria Francisco Franco in Barcelona was the largest such building constructed up to that point in the National Health Facilities Plan, promoted by the Franco regime. The plan proposed the creation of 34,000 beds to meet the needs of the beneficiaries of the Seguro Obligatorio de Enfermedad [Compulsory Health Insurance] system. To name the new healthcare facilities, those responsible for the plan rejected the term “hospital”, as hospitals had traditionally cared for patients without resources, and the word was associated with charity and mortality. Finally, it was decided to call them residences. At that time, the most common hospital model was the pavilion layout, with the Hospital de Sant Pau as a prime example. However, Vall d’Hebron Hospital adopted a different model of hospital architecture. The building was designed by the architect Aurelio Botella as a 13-storey structure with a comb-shaped floor plan. It consisted of a central block, providing access to the nursing wings, which housed rooms for one to six patients. Behind the main complex was another building with surgical services on the upper floors and general medicine on the lower floors. The ground floor housed the services and administration offices. The façade was plain and unadorned; combined with its size, it gave the hospital a solid and imposing presence, an enormous structure surrounded by fields. It was exceptionally well equipped for the time, both medically and in terms of facilities. It even had an internal public address system, unique in Spain, which made it possible to communicate across the entire hospital and broadcast music simultaneously.
Saint Jerome was a hermit who lived in the Holy Land. When the Jeronimite monks founded the monastery, the lushness of the landscape reminded them of the Valley of Hebron in Palestine, so they named the monastery Sant Jeroni de la Vall d’Hebron.
During the Second Republic, plans for a hospital in the Vall d’Hebron area had already been considered, but the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War interrupted the project.
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