1965 · A section inside a multi-sport club
The Club Bàsquet Grup Barna was born in 1965 as the basketball section of the Centre Parroquial de Sant Martí del Clot. It did not start as a basketball club: it started as a multi-sport organisation open to every young person in the neighbourhood, at a time when organised sport belonged almost entirely to religious and elite schools — the only ones with decent facilities.
In neighbourhoods without that privilege, sport arrived through personal initiative. In El Clot it arrived by making do with the modest facilities of the old Rodó. In the early years the club also had a table tennis section — which won three Barcelona Championships (1968, 1969, 1970) and one Spanish Championship — until it was eventually dropped and Grup Barna became what it is today: an organisation devoted entirely to basketball.
What the club has always held up as the most important thing is not the trophies, however bright, but the other thing: a place where generations of children from El Clot feel at home, learn to play and make friendships that often last a lifetime. That is still, today, the reason a non-profit sports club exists.
Where the name «Grup Barna» comes from
The version that has come down to us, pieced together from the collective memory of the club's older members, starts with Lluís Bouyssi, Joan Manuel Serrat and a few friends who came back to Barcelona from Tarragona and decided to form a «Barcelona group of former students of the Universidad Laboral de Tarragona». The name was far too long for everyday use, and «Barcelona» was shortened to «Barna». That is how the name Grup Barna.
Where the colours come from
The colours are less clear, but two things have been passed down from one generation to the next. The first games this group of friends played were in the red shirt of the Universidad Laboral team — with squad numbers made from scraps of plastic sewn on by hand — and that red stayed on through the newly founded club's first season.
Black, on the other hand, was Lluís Bouyssi's favourite colour; he dressed in it head to toe. The version that has stuck is that Bouyssi put his favourite colour together with the red already in use, to keep the link with where the group came from. That is how the black and red combination the club has worn ever since was born: the first short-sleeved shirt had a black body and red sleeves, precisely so as not to lose the colour of the original team.
That is how it was, or how we believe it was: the origin of a name and of a set of colours that are still the club's sixty-one years later.
The youth system
Out of the collective effort of players, coaches and board members have come names that left their mark on Catalan basketball. In the seventies, eighties and nineties, among others, Germán González (Joventut de Badalona, Manresa, Caixa de Ronda, Caixa Canarias), Eduardo González (Premià, Canet, Vic) and Jordi Grau, an international point guard with the Spanish junior national team (Licor 43, Caixa de Ronda).
El Clot's youth system has not stopped. From the same court have come, in more recent generations, Iván García and Fabian Téllez; and today, Javier Torralba (head coach of Valencia Basket's women's team in the Liga Femenina Endesa), Ainhoa López (captain of Spar Girona in the same league), Roger Fornas (ACB and LEB Oro) and David Mejía (Tercera FEB champion), as well as several players who went on to FC Barcelona's youth teams.
The club today
sixty-one years after it was founded, Grup Barna is in the same place in El Clot and has the same identity: a neighbourhood club, non-profit, with 34+ teams and more than 450 players. In 2025 the club marked its 60th anniversary with a programme of events that put women's basketball at the centre.
The club's current model — equal investment, a pathway into leadership for women and the Escoleta as the way in — is set out on the women's basketball page and in the club's official data .