Old Hospital de la Santa Creu and the Library of Catalonia

Historic · El Raval (Ciutat Vella)Barcelona,Spain

A medieval Barcelona hospital whose long Gothic wards are now the reading rooms of Catalonia's national library, around a quiet arcaded courtyard.

The Hospital de la Santa Creu is a medieval hospital that reads books now. Its long upper wards, built to hold the sick of Barcelona, are the reading rooms of the National Library of Catalonia: rows of desks and shelving under high timber ceilings, with the Gothic structure untouched overhead. Below them, stone vaults on wide arches carry the whole thing. At the centre is a Gothic courtyard with an arcade around it, open all day and one of the quietest places in the quarter. The hospital treated patients here for five hundred years, from 1414 until it closed in 1926 — the year Antoni Gaudí was carried in from a tram accident and died in one of its rooms. Its foundation stone had gone down in 1401 with the king present, and it grew by stages into the largest hospital in Catalonia. The library moved into the wards in 1939. Around the same courtyard stand the Institute for Catalan Studies, in the old convalescent house, and the Royal Academy of Medicine, which keeps an eighteenth-century anatomical theatre.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The reading rooms are not a sight — this is a working research library, so getting under the vaults needs either a reader's card or a booked tour rather than simply walking in.
Use the Carrer del Carme gate — the entrance on that side brings you straight into the courtyard under the arcades, while the other gate arrives at the back of it through service ground.
Sit in the garden for ten minutes — the courtyard has orange trees, benches and stone stairs, and it is used by residents rather than visitors, so the noise level drops the moment you step through the gate.

Things to do

1
Sit under the arcade in the courtyard
Come in through the gate and take a bench in the shade of the ground-floor arcade. Above you the wards run the length of two sides of the yard. Orange trees, stone steps, students on the paving, and almost no through traffic. It is open all day, and most people walking the Raval never turn into it.
2
Look up at the vaults from the reading room floor
If you get in with a card or a tour, stand at the end of the long hall and look along it. Stone arches step away above the desks, unaltered, with reading lamps and shelving fitted underneath them. The hall is silent in the way only a working library is, which makes the medieval roof much more present than it would be in an empty monument.
3
Read the tiled panels by the doors
Work round the courtyard doorways and look for the painted ceramic scenes set into the walls at eye height. They show the hospital's own patrons and stories in blue and yellow. They are the only decoration in an otherwise plain stone complex, and they are exactly where a patient's family would have waited.