The Gaudí Trail

There's a phrase that's repeated in almost all the guides: Gaudí built three works outside of Catalonia, "El Capricho" in Comillas, the "Casa Botines" in León, and the Episcopal Palace in Astorga. The phrase works, but only with two conditions that no one puts in writing: that we're talking about edificios (buildings), and of buildings levantados desde cero (built from scratch).

As soon as those two conditions are met, the number changes. Outside of Catalonia, Gaudí designed, signed, or was involved in at least nine projects, spread across three autonomous communities: Cantabria, Castilla y León, and the Balearic Islands. And in Comillas, where everyone talks about a work, there are three interventions: a villa, a now-disappeared kiosk, and the furniture of a chapel.

It's not a matter of scholarly correction. It changes what one is looking for. Someone who travels to Comillas to see "Gaudí's work" often walks past some of his furniture without even realizing it. And someone who goes to Palma to see the cathedral rarely knows which parts were designed by him, which were executed by another architect, and which parts are still, a hundred years later, a temporary model hanging from the ceiling.

This is the complete list, with the criteria clearly stated. Simply counting "three" is not sufficient: it's incomplete, and more importantly, it doesn't specify the rule used for the count. Here, the rule is straightforward: everything that Gaudí designed outside of Catalonia is included, regardless of whether it still exists, has been renovated, or has disappeared.

The 1881 kiosk is the most revealing example on the list. It was built for the visit of Alfonso XII to Comillas on August 6, 1881, then dismantled and moved to the Güell estate in Barcelona in 1883, where it disappeared from record. It illustrates how this network truly functioned: a kiosk from a town in Cantabria ended up on the estate of the man who would commission six projects from Gaudí over forty years. And in the process, it debunks a common misconception: in 1883, when "El Capricho" was being started, Gaudí had already worked in Comillas.

They are not united by a common style. El Capricho is a whimsical villa with sunflower-themed ceramics and a tower-minaret; Astorga is a neo-Gothic palace made of white granite; and the Casa Botines is a prismatic building with four towers, built to house the textile warehouse and the exchange office of its owners. What unites them is the calendar, and also a shared network of contacts.

The timeline first. The three fit within eleven years, between 1883 and 1893. "El Capricho" begins in 1883, the same year as the Casa Vicens in Barcelona. The "Casa Botines" is inaugurated on September 15, 1893. Gaudí resigns from Astorga on November 4 of that same year, 1893. After that date, he does not accept another commission outside of Catalonia until 1902, and that is not a new building: it is the renovation of a cathedral belonging to someone else.

It's a question that almost no guidebook answers, and in two out of three cases, the answer isn't "Gaudí." It's worth putting it in a table because, when read in prose, the information tends to get lost.

The blank space is just as informative as the filled-in ones. We haven't found any published information about a site supervisor for the Casa Botines other than Gaudí. This doesn't mean that there wasn't one; it simply means that we don't know, and we prefer to leave it blank rather than filling the space with a guess.

The answer is not fame. In 1883, Gaudí had been a professional architect for about five years and was a relatively unknown architect in Barcelona, outside of the city. Commissions from outside the city came through specific individuals. The Bishop of Astorga, Joan Baptista Grau i Vallespinós, was from Reus, like Gaudí, was twenty years older than him, and they had met in Tarragona, when Grau, as general vicar, inaugurated the Church of Jesús-María, for which Gaudí had designed the altar. The commission for Casa Botines came through the recommendation of Eusebi Güell. And Comillas was the town of the Marquis, whose daughter, Isabel López i Bru, had married Güell himself.

That the connection with Botines was textile, as is repeated, is not documented. What does fit is the banking circuit: the two merchants from León were representatives of the Banco Hispano-Colonial, founded by the Marquis of Comillas, who was Güell's father-in-law. This is a coherent reconstruction, not proof, and it is important to present it as such.

There's a detail that connects the projects outside of Astorga with those within, and which is not often mentioned. In 1888, the year before the cornerstone of Astorga was laid, Bishop Grau purchased the estate of Bellesguard, at the foot of Tibidabo, on the site of Martí l'Humà's castle. When he died in 1893, his trustees sold it for 65,000 pesetas to Maria Sagués i Molins, widow of Jaume Figueras. And on June 12, 1900, it was Gaudí who signed the purchase agreement on behalf of the widow, because she couldn't write.

From that estate emerged Torre Bellesguard, one of Gaudí's works in Barcelona. In other words, the land where a house on Tibidabo stood passed through the hands of his client from Astorga. The "distant" works and the "domestic" works are not two separate chapters of his biography; they are the same network of people, viewed from two different perspectives. The list of works in Barcelona is read differently when you know this.

The same circuit produced the commission that never came to fruition. The missions of Tangier, planned between 1892 and 1893 at the request of Father José María Lertxundi and the Marquises of Comillas, remained on paper: a quadrilobed structure within a circle of 120 meters and seventeen parabolic towers. All that remains of it is a single black and white photograph in the archive, and it is the most direct prefiguration of what would later become the Sagrada Família. It was not built due to the reservations of the Holy See regarding the opulence of the project and due to the crisis that followed the Margallo War, in 1893.

In 2005, Spain requested the expansion of the property "Works of Antoni Gaudí," which was inscribed in 1984 with three buildings in Barcelona. It presented twelve works. ICOMOS, the organization that evaluates cultural nominations, accepted four and rejected eight. Among the eight rejected are El Capricho, the Palace of Astorga, the Casa Botines, and the cathedral of Palma: all four of the works located outside of Catalonia, without exception. This is a fact that almost no one mentions, and it explains why these works have a different level of visibility.

The criterion is explicit and has nothing arbitrary about it, although it may be painful: what this list measures is exceptionality on an international scale, not the quality of a building. The decision was approved on July 15, 2005, with the number 29 COM 8B.47, and during the same process, two of the criteria that Spain had proposed were rejected. Not being a World Heritage Site does not leave them unprotected: the three, along with the liturgical elements that Gaudí installed in the main chapel of Palma, are declared a monument by the decree of July 24, 1969, published in the BOE (Official State Gazette) on August 20, which protected seventeen of his works at once. Gaudí was the first contemporary artist to achieve this in Spain, when the rule required a century of antiquity.