Barcelona remains Energie Fitness anchor in Catalonia expansion

Energie Fitness has added Girona to its Spanish map, but the opening says more about Barcelona than about the city on the Ter. The British chain opened its new club on calle Barcelona on May 1, a 1,300-square-meter site that it expects to fill with about 1,700 members. That is the kind of mid-sized format that can travel, and it is exactly why Barcelona still matters most.

The Catalan capital remains the reference point because Energie Fitness already operates in Barcelona, Sant Cugat del Vallès, Sabadell, Tarragona and Sant Pere de Ribes, and because its growth plan keeps circling back to the city and its orbit. Girona extends the network to 12 gyms in Spain, but the real value of the move is the way it reinforces a cluster strategy that starts in Barcelona, spreads through the metropolitan area and then uses nearby cities as launch pads for scale.

That logic fits the market. Between 2019 and 2024, 45 clubs opened in the area metropolitana de Barcelona, which has raised the level of competition but also proven there is still room for operators that can combine volume with clear positioning. In Barcelona city itself, 12 gyms and 30,000 members are tied up in the renewal of municipal concessions, a separate battleground that keeps the market hot and makes the city a constant reference for private chains looking to win share. The first quarter of 2026 also showed the sector’s pace, with 83 openings and 61 million euros of investment across Spanish fitness.

For Energie Fitness, Barcelona is not just another market; it is the commercial anchor for a franchise model that arrived in Spain in 2020 and first entered Catalunya in Sant Cugat. The chain later added Barcelona, then Sabadell, where it opened a 3,000-square-meter club in December 2025, its largest in Spain, and surpassed 1,000 members there. That sequence suggests a company that has already validated its format in the Barcelona orbit and is now testing how far that template can stretch across a less centralized Catalunya.

The answer may be both export and adaptation. Girona looks like a repeatable model, but the chain is also building beyond Catalonia, with projects in Bilbao, Benalmádena, Valladolid and Madrid. Barcelona still sets the tone, yet the next phase will show whether Energie Fitness can turn a Barcelona-led playbook into a broader Spanish network without losing the density and control that made the formula work in the first place.