Park Güell

Park · La Salut (Gràcia)Barcelona,Spain

A hillside above Barcelona that Gaudí shaped for a garden suburb nobody bought, now a public park of tiled benches, stone viaducts and woodland.

Park Güell is a hillside of tilted stone and broken tile above Barcelona. A terrace at the top is edged by a long undulating bench covered in fragments of tile and china, no two stretches of it the same. From up there the city lies flat below you all the way to the sea, with the towers of the Sagrada Família standing out of it. Underneath the terrace is a hall of eighty-six columns, and viaducts run out across the slope on piers of stone quarried where they stand. It was meant to be a private estate of sixty houses. Eusebi Güell had bought a bare hillside locals called the Bald Mountain and wanted an English-style garden suburb on it; two houses were built, and one of them became Gaudí's own home. Gaudí spent fourteen years from 1900 shaping the ground instead, and the city bought the land in 1922 and opened it as a park four years later. 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.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The terrace works in shifts — Through the middle of the day the bench is shoulder to shoulder; in the first and last hours of light it half empties.
No shade at all on the terrace — In high summer the tile holds heat like a stovetop; the cool ground is the pine paths and the columned hall below.
Photograph the salamander from above and to one side — Head-on is where everyone stands and the shape flattens; low side-light late in the day makes the glaze glow instead of glare.
The bench reads as one line only from above — From the paths climbing behind the terrace you can look down and see the whole curve, which you cannot do sitting on it.

Things to do

1
Look straight up in the hall of columns
Step into the hypostyle hall and tip your head back until you have found the four big ceiling medallions among the smaller discs. Then stand still and listen: the low vault gathers sound, which is why musicians set up here. Before you leave, put a hand on one of the outer columns and feel how far it leans.
2
Take a bay on the serpentine bench
The bench is not one curve but a run of shallow bays. Pick an outward one for the sea, an inward one when the sun is high, then sit properly back — the shape catches the spine, and the bay cuts off some of the noise behind you. By late afternoon the tile under your hands is warm.
3
Climb to the three crosses
Leave the terrace and keep climbing the ramped paths through the pines until the ground runs out at Turó de les Tres Creus, a rough stone mound where the estate's chapel was to have stood. The view comes back a full circle: the Collserola ridge inland, the port and the open sea below. The wind never quite stops.
4
Walk beneath the viaducts
Take the lower deck of a viaduct rather than the road along the top. Underneath, the piers splay outward like trunks and the whole structure explains itself — everything leans the way the load leans. In the Pòrtic de la Bugadera, find the column carved as a woman with a washing basket on her head.