Palau de la Música Catalana

The Palau de la Música Catalana is the most exuberant concert hall in Europe, a building in which almost every surface sings. It was designed by Lluís Domènech i Montaner, one of the masters of Catalan modernisme, for the Orfeó Català choral society, built between 1905 and 1908 and inaugurated on 9 February 1908. The site is a cramped plot in the old streets of Sant Pere, and from outside you see it in fragments: brick columns sheathed in mosaic, busts of composers, and at the corner a great sculptural group by Miquel Blay celebrating Catalan popular song.

Inside, the auditorium is enclosed by walls of stained glass, and overhead hangs its signature: a skylight designed by Antoni Rigalt in which an inverted dome of golden glass sags toward the audience, ringed with blue, a sun set in the sky. The hall is lit by daylight, a rare quality for a concert room. Around the stage, sculpture breaks out of the wall: on the left a bust of Anselm Clavé, the choir director who revived Catalan folk song, beneath a stone tree, on the right Beethoven between Doric columns with Wagner's Valkyries galloping above him, the work of Dídac Masana and Pablo Gargallo. Behind the performers, eighteen young women known as the muses, their upper bodies sculpted by Eusebi Arnau and their lower halves worked in mosaic by Lluís Bru, seem to emerge from the back wall playing their instruments.

The Palau was made a World Heritage Site in 1997, together with Domènech's Hospital de Sant Pau. Between 1982 and 1989 the architects Óscar Tusquets and Carles Díaz restored it and added a new building alongside, and a second, smaller hall, the Petit Palau, opened below ground in 2004. The main hall seats about 2,200 people and remains a working stage for choral, symphonic and popular music, so the best way to see it is to hear it.

Getting there

The Palau stands at the corner of Carrer Palau de la Música and Carrer de Sant Pere Més Alt, in the Sant Pere quarter of Ciutat Vella, about 500 metres from the heart of Barcelona's Gothic Quarter. Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport (BCN) is about 13 km away.