Antoni Gaudí

Antoni Gaudí i Cornet (1852–1926) did not invent Barcelona — the city is two thousand years old and he worked in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth. But he marked it more deeply than any architect has marked any other European city.

Older accounts call him "Antonio Gaudí" and his movement Spanish Art Nouveau. He was Catalan, he worked in Catalan, and the movement is Modernisme — related to Art Nouveau but not the same thing.

The three with pages of their own

  • The Sagrada Família — the basilica, unfinished since 1882 and, since October 2025, the tallest church in the world.
  • Park Güell — a failed housing estate that became a public park. Entry to the monumental part is ticketed and must be booked.
  • Casa Milà, known to everyone as La Pedrera — the apartment block on Passeig de Gràcia with the undulating stone front.

The others, and which are worth the detour

  • Casa Batlló, a few doors from Casa Milà on Passeig de Gràcia, is the remodelling of an existing house between 1904 and 1906 — not 1907, as older accounts give it. The scaled roof and the balconies that look like masks are the most photographed façade in the city after the basilica. The interior visit is now heavily digital, with projection rooms in the old coal cellars and a staircase added by Kengo Kuma, and a contemporary art gallery opened on the second floor in January 2026.
  • Casa Vicens, in Gràcia, is the first house Gaudí designed, built between 1883 and 1885 — and it only opened to the public, for the first time in its history, on 16 November 2017. No account written before then mentions it, and it is the least crowded of the major works.
  • Palau Güell, off the lower Rambla, was built for his patron Eusebi Güell in the 1880s and is the best place to understand what Gaudí did with a dark, narrow city plot. Closed on Mondays.
  • The crypt at Colònia Güell, at Santa Coloma de Cervelló outside the city, is reached by train from Plaça d'Espanya. Only the crypt of the intended church was ever built. It is where Gaudí worked out, by hanging weighted strings and photographing the result upside down, the leaning columns and parabolic vaults he then used in the basilica. For anyone interested in how the buildings actually stand up, it is the most instructive Gaudí site there is.
  • The lampposts. Older accounts place Gaudí's lampposts at the Pla de Palau, and that is half right. The pair everyone photographs are the six-armed ones in the Plaça Reial, lit in 1879 and topped with a caduceus for commerce. Two three-armed ones do survive at the Pla de Palau, by the old customs house, with lizards instead of the winged helmet.

What the UNESCO listing actually covers

The serial property is "Works of Antoni Gaudí", inscribed in 1984 with Park Güell, Palau Güell and Casa Milà, and extended in 2005 to add Casa Vicens, Casa Batlló, the crypt at Colònia Güell, and — this is the part routinely got wrong — only the Nativity façade and the crypt of the Sagrada Família, not the whole basilica.

How he died

On 7 June 1926 Gaudí was struck by a tram on the Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes. Shabbily dressed and carrying no papers, he was taken for a beggar and ended up in the Santa Creu hospital, where he was not recognised for some time. He died on 10 June, aged seventy-three, and is buried in the crypt of the basilica he had been building for forty-three years.

Older accounts say work on the Sagrada Família halted at his death. It did not: his collaborators carried on, and what stopped the work was the Civil War in 1936, when the workshop was burnt and the plaster models smashed.

A note on sainthood, which is overstated everywhere

The cause for Gaudí's canonisation opened in Barcelona in 2003, and in April 2025 he was declared Venerable — a recognition of heroic virtue. He has not been beatified and is not a saint; beatification would require a recognised miracle, and none has been attributed. Anything describing him as about to be made a saint is running well ahead of the facts.

Getting the names right

In Catalan: Antoni Gaudí, Casa Milà, Casa Batlló, Palau Güell, Colònia Güell, Sagrada Família. One deliberate oddity: Park Güell is spelt with the English "Park", not the Catalan "Parc" — Eusebi Güell chose the Anglicism when he commissioned it, and the original tilework says so.

The rest of the city is on the Barcelona page.

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