The Ribes Roges urban complex is made up of streets which are parallel and perpendicular to the seafront. It is bounded by the Passeig de Ribes Roges, the streets of Marcelina Jacas, Legazpi and Álvaro de Bazán and Torrent de Sant Joan, the street of Pere III el Gran and a large part of the block bounded by Passeig de Ribes Roges and the streets of Lluís de Requesens, Pere III el Gran and Isaac Peral.

Each block contains several plots occupied by single-family houses surrounded by gardens. Although as a whole it does not present a stylistic unity, it still preserves some of the original buildings, mainly in the seafront sector, which present characteristics typical of the modernist and noucentista styles.

The Villa Argentina and the Villa Montserrat (architect Josep Domènech Mansana) are the closest examples to the Catalan Art Nouveau style, as well as Doctor Ribot’s villa (Villa Esperanza) and the Villa Laguarda (both by the architect Bonaventura Pollés Vivó), and the Villa Teresa (Modest Tauler Benítez, architect), which have been preserved. The other villas are closer to the Noucentisme period, such as the Villa Isabel (by Ramon Frexé Mallofré, 1910-1912); the Villa Vivancos (by Josep M. Miró Guibernau, 1923); the Villa Dolors Rutllan (by Manuel Joaquim Raspall Mayol, 1925) and Villa Adelina, and the villas of Joan Robert and Lluís Pàmies (by Antoni Pons Domínguez, 1923, 1925 and 1926).

The origin of the Ribes Roges housing development was the initiative of Ms. Anna Raventós de Saurí, president of the Empar de Santa Llúcia, a charitable institution that was to be the beneficiary of the profits produced by the development. Marcelina Jacas, who had considerable wealth inherited from her father and an uncle, both of whom were Hindus, gave the rural land she owned for the construction of the chalets in order to raise funds to support the organisation.

The foundation stone for the first 10 chalets was laid in 1910. In the same year, the board commissioned several architects to carry out the construction work and left the municipal architect B. Pollés to carry out the project for the Passeig Marítim and the general plan for the distribution of the plots. The complex is detached from the urban fabric of the city. The Torrent de Sant Joan and the railway line hindered its growth and expansion from the beginning and it was outside the scope of Gumà i Ferran's General Plan and, therefore, of the expansion guidelines set out in the plan.

In 1917, the municipal architect Josep M. Miró i Guibernau designed the total development of the sector in accordance with the garden city typology. The construction of the promenade was authorised and the complete layout of the road network and the study of the links with the city were carried out. The study of the layout of the links, although very correct, was never carried out due to the difficulty posed by the location of the Pirelli factory.

In 1967, a new development plan allowed an increase in the density of buildings, which led to the abandonment of the garden city idea and the demolition of the original dwellings; this resulted in the demolition of many single-family villas, to be replaced by flat blocks. As a reaction to this trend, a new General Development Plan was approved in 1981, which sought to protect these dwellings by classifying Ribes Roges as a "garden city conservation area".