Park Güell was meant to be a private estate of sixty houses, and almost nobody came: two were built, and one of them became Gaudí's own home. Eusebi Güell had bought a bare hillside locals called the Bald Mountain and wanted an English-style garden suburb on it. From 1900 Gaudí spent fourteen years shaping the ground instead — viaducts on tilted columns of stone quarried where they stand, a hall of eighty-six columns meant as the estate's market, and above it a terrace edged by a long undulating bench covered in broken tile and china, most of it laid by Josep Maria Jujol.
The city bought the land in 1922 and opened it as a public park four years later. You climb through pine and carob to the terrace, and you hear the crowd up there before you see what they came for: the city lying flat below you all the way to the sea, with the towers of the Sagrada Família standing out of it. The bench turns out to be shaped to the body, and no two stretches of its tile repeat. Keep going uphill past the terrace and the paths empty within minutes — most of Park Güell is woodland, and up there the parakeets are louder than the people.