A concert hall that is bathed in sunlight during the day

The Palau was completed in 1908, and in that year, it was expensive and generated a lot of heat to illuminate a hall that could hold two thousand people with electricity. Domènech solved the problem by removing the wall's responsibility for supporting the roof. He installed an iron structure, and once the iron was in place, the wall no longer had to bear any weight. He then replaced the wall with glass on two of the four sides.

The result is that during the day, the hall does not need electric light, and there is no other in Europe for which that can be said. In the center of the ceiling hangs a stained-glass skylight that is neither flat nor concave: it slopes downwards towards the audience like an inverted drop, blue in the center and golden around the edges. It came from the workshop of Antoni Rigalt. From below, it looks like a decoration. It is a skylight.

The visitor experience consists of two spaces and a video. The first is the Lluís Millet Hall, located on the first floor, featuring a double colonnade that opens onto the street-facing balcony. The columns are covered in mosaic, and no two have the same design. This is where people often take photos, and where the guide, if you have one, explains the origin of the funding, which is a story of popular subscription rather than a single benefactor.

The second area is the hall. At the back of the stage, there are eighteen female figures, with the upper half rendered in relief and the lower half in mosaic. This is a trick of perspective that only becomes apparent when someone points it out; otherwise, it's easy to miss. On either side of the proscenium, we see Anselm Clavé representing popular music and Beethoven representing classical music, with the Valkyries riding above them. The hall has just over two thousand seats and takes a good twenty minutes to walk through.

None of this is by Gaudí. And yet, this is what you occasionally read in visitor reviews:

The three providers sell the same thing in two ways, and the ratings are not tied. On Viator, the guided tour has a rating of 4.7 out of 687 reviews, and the entrance with an audio guide has a rating of 4.4 out of 269. On Tiqets, the guided tour receives a 4.7 out of 1,552 reviews, and the entrance without a guide receives a 4.6 out of 2,214. These are the only two comparisons with a sufficient sample size to be meaningful, and both point in the same direction. The third, from Civitatis, goes in the opposite direction, but its individual entrance only has 25 reviews, and with only 25 reviews, no conclusions can be drawn.

The price difference between the two options is two to four euros. I would pay the two euros for the audio guide, and not out of snobbery: spending half an hour looking at the building's iconography is worthwhile, and iconography without someone to interpret it is just a pretty ceiling. The audio guide makes sense if you're traveling with children who get tired of listening, if you arrive late for your scheduled time slot, or if you've already read about the Palau and just want to see it.

Two of the ten products are not performances: they are concerts, costing 55 € each, and they are the highest-rated items on the page with a score of 4.9. It's important to know exactly what they are. They are not part of the Orfeó Català season or the resident orchestra's season, which are sold separately; instead, they are Spanish guitar and flamenco programs designed for a general audience, one featuring the Barcelona Guitar Trio and a dancer, and the other featuring a guitar trio. They last for a long hour and start in the afternoon or evening.

If you were expecting a symphony, this is not it, and it's better to find out from the catalog rather than from your seat. If what you want is to hear what the hall sounds like when it's full, the repertoire is less important, and the 4.9 rating explains itself. What you need to be clear about in both cases is that a seat does not include a tour: you enter the hall, you sit down, you listen, and you leave. The Lluís Millet Hall and the balcony colonnade are not included.

Regarding the timing: the skylight works best with strong sunlight. In the early morning, the stained glass is both lit and dark at the same time, if that makes sense, and in winter, by three o'clock in the afternoon, half the light is already gone. The best time is from eleven to two. This is, predictably, the time that gets booked up first, so in July or during Easter week, it's advisable to book several days in advance.