Park Güell

Interesting facts

Rain falling on the great terrace soaks through its unpaved surface into the columns and a cistern of about 1,200 cubic metres, and overflow pours from the dragon's mouth.

The serpentine bench around the terrace runs for about 110 metres and was covered in broken tile and glass by Gaudí's collaborator Josep Maria Jujol.

Among the bench's shards Jujol hid zodiac signs, flowers, crabs and short prayers to the Virgin Mary in Catalan and Latin, along with his own initial.

The hall below was planned with 90 columns; four were left out, and in their place Jujol set large ceiling roundels representing the four seasons.

The mushroom-like dome of the entrance lodge is ribbed with upturned coffee cups, and neither gatehouse contains a single right angle.

The 2.4-metre dragon has been read as an alchemical salamander, the Python of Delphi, or the crocodile on the arms of Nîmes, where Güell grew up.

Each of the three stone viaducts follows a different historical style, Gothic, Baroque and Romanesque, and one was built around a living carob tree.

The main avenue follows an old Roman road and is lined with 150 stone balls, each 60 cm across, set out like the beads of a rosary.

Before the park, the rocky hillside was known as Muntanya Pelada, the Bare Mountain.

The house where Gaudí lived was not designed by him but by his assistant Francesc Berenguer, built as a show home for the development.

Why it is worth it

Park Güell was supposed to be a real estate project, and by that measure it was a total failure. In 1900 the industrialist Eusebi Güell hired Antoni Gaudí to lay out an exclusive gated community of sixty houses on a hillside above Barcelona, loosely modelled on the English garden-city idea Güell admired abroad. Gaudí finished the entrance pavilions, the grand staircase, the viaducts, and the market hall beneath the main terrace by 1907 — but only two houses out of sixty ever sold. The First World War killed what was left of the project in 1914, Güell died in 1918 having never recouped the investment, and his heirs eventually gave the failed development to Barcelona's city council, which opened it to the public as a municipal park in 1926.

The one house that did sell went to Gaudí himself, who lived there with his father and niece for close to twenty years — meaning the architect spent much of his later career living inside his own unsold real estate project. What survives from that failed venture, though, is some of the most instantly recognisable architecture in Europe: the so-called Hall of a Hundred Columns, which despite the nickname actually has 86, was built to double as a covered market for residents who never arrived, and its tilted Doric columns were engineered specifically to channel rainwater down through hidden ducts into an underground cistern — ornament that is also plumbing.

The park's real icon, though, is a salamander. Partway up the entrance staircase sits El Drac, a dragon-shaped mosaic creature built from broken tile shards in Gaudí's signature trencadís technique — cracked ceramic and glass reassembled into a jewel-bright surface that predates the word 'upcycling' by a century. According to local legend, salamanders were believed capable of surviving fire by smothering it, which may explain why Gaudí set one to guard a fountain rather than an actual dragon. It has since become the single most photographed object in Barcelona's second most famous piece of Gaudí architecture.

Good to know

Since 2013 the park has been split in two: a free zone covering more than 90% of the grounds, and a ticketed Monumental Zone — home to the dragon staircase and the Hall of a Hundred Columns — introduced specifically to stop overcrowding, with hourly visitor numbers now capped.

Getting there

Located in El Carmel. Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport (BCN) is about 14 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Park Güell is a complex of parks and gardens in Barcelona with architectural elements, located in the La Salut neighborhood of the Gràcia district in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It is situated on the southern slope of the Turó del Carmel hill, part of the Collserola mountain range, overlooking the city. The separate Parc del Carmel lies on the northern side of the same hill.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0