Sant Pau Recinte Modernista

Landmark · El Guinardó (Horta-Guinardó)Barcelona,Spain

A Barcelona hospital built as a village of twenty-seven ceramic pavilions in gardens, joined by a kilometre of tunnels so patients never went outside.

Sant Pau is a hospital built as a village. Twenty-seven separate pavilions stand in gardens rather than one large block, each covered in ceramic, mosaic and carved stone, with domed roofs and sculpted portals, on a scale nobody has attempted for a hospital before or since. Underneath, about a kilometre of tunnels connects them, so a patient could be wheeled from one building to another without being taken out in the rain. Lluís Domènech i Montaner designed twelve of the pavilions and his son continued after him. They went up between 1902 and 1930, on the theory that air and light cure people and that infection has further to travel between free-standing wards. The hospital worked here until 2009, when it moved into a modern building next door, and the site opened to visitors in 2014 after five years of restoration. Some pavilions are offices now and closed. What you walk through is a garden of interiors: tiled wards with vaulted ceilings, coloured glass, and rooms built for two dozen beds that now hold nothing at all.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Walk the central avenue first — the pavilions are laid out symmetrically on either side of one axis, so the whole plan makes sense in two minutes from the middle before you go into anything.
Not everything you can see is open — several pavilions are working offices and stay shut, and only part of the tunnel network is on the route, so the visit is smaller than the site looks.
Look at the floor and the ceiling in a ward — the corners are rounded rather than square, because dirt collects in an angle and a curved joint can be washed down properly.
Come in the morning for the gardens — the ceramic on the domes reads best in low side light, and by the middle of the day the open ground between pavilions has no shade at all.

Things to do

1
Drop below the pavilions
The visit takes you below ground into part of the service network that links the pavilions. It is plain, wide, and lit at intervals, with pipework running overhead. After the tiled wards upstairs the change is total, and it makes the point that the decoration was a surface over a working machine.
2
Take the middle of an empty ward
Pick one of the restored pavilions and walk to the middle of its main room. Coloured glass, a vaulted ceiling, tiled walls, and space for twenty-odd beds that are no longer there. Look for the small chapel alcove at one end: the ward was designed so that a service could be held without moving anybody.
3
Line the site up with the Sagrada Familia
Come out of the main gate and look straight down the avenue in front of you. The Sagrada Familia stands at the far end, four blocks away, framed by the trees. The street was cut on this diagonal on purpose, against the grid, so that the two buildings would face each other.