Some city planners hailed this as the most ambitious building project of the 1992 Olympics. When it was perceived that Barcelona lacked a state-of-the-art television transmitter, a team of engineers whipped up plans for a space-age needle. Completed within 24 months of its initiation, it rises 940 feet above the city's highest mountain ridge, the Collserola, beaming TV signals throughout the rest of Europe. Open now as a tourist attraction, the tower offers panoramic views over Catalonia, as well as insight into some of the most bizarre engineering in town. Trussed with cables radiating outward to massive steel anchors, the tower perches delicately atop an alarmingly narrow vertical post only 14 feet wide. A high-speed elevator carries visitors from deep inside the mountain (where there's a cafeteria) to an observation platform 1,820 feet above the Mediterranean.