Since it was inaugurated in 2005, the Office for Religious Affairs has organised its work in three main areas: assistance and support for religious and belief communities and organisations, advice for City Council staff in religious pluralism and the promotion of religious diversity among citizens.

According to OAR data there are 37 organised religious and spiritual traditions in Barcelona and 535 places of worship. Catholicism accounts for the largest number (233), followed by evangelical churches (182) and Islamic oratories (39). For these communities and all religious organisations established in the city, the OAR has become a point of reference, providing advice on 4,000 occasions since 2017.

Training has been a key tool in the OAR promoting the right to religious freedom and giving visibility to and normalising the presence of the different belief options in the city. In all, 226 training sessions have been given with the presence of over 4,500 people, plus a hundred dissemination activities on religious diversity, which over 9,000 people have taken part in.

Religious freedom is recognised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Even so, the Observatory on Discrimination Report for 2024 points to 30 cases of discrimination on religious grounds in the city last year, 22 of them linked to Islamophobia.