I t may have passed some by but, not content with providing the European football champions, the Wimbledon and French Open tennis champion and the winner of the Tour de France, Spain - or more specifically Barcelona - has also produced the champions of Hertfordshire rugby’s Greene King Super Premier Merit Table. Sixteen years after the Olympics in the Catalan capital, the table-topping achievements of Poble Nou-Enginyers, who fly to the UK for every away fixture, are the latest that can be attributed to the success of the 1992 Games.

OK, a modest achievement indeed, but the architects of 1992 would have liked it. Poble Nou-Enginyers are an amateur team playing in a facility that was built only because the Olympics were coming to town. The Complex Esportiu de la Mar Bella also housed the Olympic badminton competition and it sits just above the beachside, which you would not have been able to see preGames either.

As Barcelona residents will tell you, with an understandable degree of pride, the Games gave them their seaside. Before 1992 they had sea but no beach, just a railway hugging the coast and no room for a sandcastle between that and the Mediterranean. But they needed an Olympic village and so, as part of the vast programme of regeneration, three kilometres of beach appeared. And it did not stop in 1992. Three kilometres became five and the seven beachside restaurants that ambitious planners scheduled for this new patch of land have grown to 70.

It is arguable whether easyJet and the tastes for a globetrotting hen party have done more for tourism in this city than the Olympics, but what is certain is that the former paved the way for the latter. That is why those discussing the Games often talk of the “Barcelona model”, because it was the one that worked. And that is why a team from London 2012 travelled there on a fact-finding mission two years ago.

The similarities are clear. London, like Barcelona, has in mind an Olympics that will transform a large area of industrial wasteland. Unfortunately, the message from Barcelona is that London has left it too late. One of the key figures in the success of Barcelona ’92 was David Mackay, the architect who was born in Eastbourne, East Sussex, in 1933, transferred to Barcelona in 1958 and has remained there since, his crowning glory being the design of the Olympic village and port.

London 2012, he said, could have had a legacy on a level with that of Barcelona. “The Olympics were a marvellous opportunity for London,” he said. “You cannot give London a seaside, but the opportunities were there to use the Lea Valley to make a huge water park. One of the mistakes London made was it needed to start earlier with its planning.”

Mackay said that he explained all this when the London 2012 team visited Barcelona. He also happily acknowledges that his firm was one of the groups of architects who competed for and failed to win the London contract. Furthermore, London would sternly reject the suggestion that 2012 will give East London only a limited legacy and the 3.5 kilometres of remodelled riverbanks would be at the heart of its argument.

But either way, Barcelona’s legacy represents something for London to aim at. In 1992 Jordi Hereu was a 27-year-old working for the port authority and he explains with delight the pride and astonishment he felt when, for the first time in his life, he saw a cruise ship sailing in to port. A new dock had been built especially for such Olympic traffic; now a further four have been built to cater for the two million tourists who arrive this way every year.

Now Hereu is the Mayor of Barcelona. “The Olympics was the big excuse to change Barcelona’s position in the world,” he said. “Before, it was an industrial city. Now it is a city of knowledge, a global city.”

Indeed, the timing was perfect. The General Franco regime ended only in 1975 and when the Olympic bid was won in 1986, the majority of the population was ready to embrace the idea of using the “excuse” to help their grey city to catch up with Western Europe. So the Games were popular from the start; while London has the large blue wall ring-fencing the Olympic park, during the building of much of Barcelona’s facilities, viewing platforms were constructed so that its citizens could see what was going on.

The figures show that consumption of cement between 1986 and 1992 went up by 250 per cent. More crucially, it did not stop after the Games and by 2001 was up to 350 per cent. The knock-on effect was felt in the hotel trade, where, between 1990 and 2004, the number of beds went up from 18,569 to 46,391. As a European city in which to do business, in the annual European Cities Monitor by Cushman and Wakefield, the commercial property consultants, Barcelona was ranked eleventh in 1990 and is now fourth.

“What Barcelona did during the two weeks of the Games was important,” Hereu said. “What Barcelona did when the two weeks was over mattered even more.”

So far, so smug, and rightly so, although the fatal flaw in Barcelona’s long-term planning was for the show-piece jewel, the Olympic Stadium. Most of the Olympic venues are in good, regular use; the diving venue, which had a fabulous view over the city and produced some of the iconic pictures of the Games, is used to train national diving teams. But the trouble with putting the diving on Montjuic - and the main stadium even higher up it - is that it is hard to get to.

It was not until five years after the Games that Espanyol, Barcelona’s “other” football team, were persuaded to move in as Olympic Stadium tenants. However, the cold nights, the distance from the action because of the athletics track and, most crucially that hill, gave it an instant popularity issue.

So Espanyol are building a new, bespoke stadium near the airport and when they move out in a year’s time the Olympic Stadium will be tenantless, home to the occasional concert and the athletics European Championships in 2010.

Hereu said that the access issue will be sorted when the metro has a stop at Montjuic, but that will not be until after those European Championships have been and gone, which suggests that the members of the planning department put their heads together a little late on this one.

It is no surprise to find that Hereu disagrees. And this, it seems, is the way of things in the Catalan capital. These Games not only gave them the sea and state-of-the-art sports facilities, it also gave them back that intangible quality that the Franco years had slowly eroded - a sense of pride.

So when you ask Mackay, the Eastbourne Catalan, what they would change if they could rewind 20 years, his answer is short and concise: “We would not do anything different.”