Barcelona has a new Olympic Games mascot 30 years later

The famous designer and illustrator, Javier Mariscal, has redesigned Cobi, Barcelona’s 1992 Olympic Games mascot 30 years later.

It is a "grown-up" Cobi, said Mariscal that has reimagined his Olympic mascot for a special edition of 'Condé Nast Traveler' magazine.

The 2022 version wears glasses, has a beard that resembles the one of a 30-year-old adult, a mobile phone and is, as opposed to the original, full of color.

Mariscal said in an interview with the magazine that the original mascot was designed to be "cute, affectionate and to have a future ahead." "It could be any one of us," explains the illustrator.

The new Cobi will be the front page of the Barcelona special edition of Condé Nast Traveler magazine.

Barcelona 1992 Olympic Games, an excuse to transform the city

The famous ‘à la ville de… Barcelona’, pronounced by the then IOC International Olympic Committee President Joan Antoni Samaranch, on October 17, 1986, in the Swiss city of Lausanne, was the best excuse to modernize the city after 40 years under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship.

On that day, the city committed to holding the event five years and nine months later, in summer 1992. Mayors Narcís Serra, and above all Pasqual Maragall, were the main organizers at a political level, but those who took charge of the actual transformation are the architects, and one of them, in particular, stood out: Oriol Bohigas, the man responsible for urban planning in the local council in the 1980s, who passed away on December 1, 2021.