Gaudí Palace (Astorga)

A bishop's palace in Astorga, designed by an architect from Barcelona, is not explained by mere prestige. It is explained by a man: Joan Baptista Grau i Vallespinós, born in Reus in 1832, the same city as Gaudí, and twenty years before him. They had met in Tarragona, when Grau, then vicar general, inaugurated the church of Jesús-María, for which Gaudí had designed the altar.

The opportunity arose due to a fire. On December 23, 1886, less than two months after Grau took possession of the diocese, the old episcopal palace burned down. A new one had to be built, and the newly arrived bishop had a fellow countryman, an architect, at his disposal in Barcelona.

The project was approved in February 1889, and the first stone was laid on June 24, 1889. The date is not coincidental: it is the feast day of Grau, who had celebrated his first mass on June 24, 1859. Exactly thirty years later, the construction of the building began, a building that he would not live to see completed.

Here is the core of the story, and it can be summarized in two dates. On September 18, 1893, Bishop Grau died in Tábara, in the province of Zamora, far from Astorga. On November 4, 1893, seven weeks later, Gaudí submitted his resignation. Without his client, he had no one to defend him from the chapter or the administration, and he left.

The building remained without an architect and without construction for fourteen years. It's the same scenario that would repeat with other of his projects, but here in its most raw form: the personal relationship was the foundation of the commission, and when that person is absent, the commission falls apart.

This is the fact that almost nobody mentions and that reorders the whole story. The episcopal palace of Astorga was a public building: the project went through the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, the works were put out to public auction and the party meant to pay was the Spanish State. This is not a patron bishop commissioning an artist, but an architect working within an administrative procedure.

And the file didn't pay. There is a letter from Gaudí to the bishop, dated November 21, 1892, that is, ten months before Grau's death, in which the complaint is written without mincing words:

With that letter in hand, the resignation of November 1893 no longer seems like a rash act by a frustrated artist. He had gone four years without payment, and he had just lost the only person who was supporting the project from within. Any professional in that situation would have done the same, and very few people would describe it that way.

Upon resigning, he made a prediction: "They won't be able to finish it, nor will they be able to leave it unfinished." He was partially right, and in this case, being partially right is being completely right: the building neither remained in ruins nor was completed as he had envisioned. It was closed, fourteen years later, under different management.

In 1905, the next bishop, Julián de Diego, went to find him at the Sagrada Família to ask him to return. Gaudí said no. And years later, when Infanta Isabel de Borbón asked him in the very temple why he had left Astorga, he replied with a phrase that summarizes the matter better than any paragraph:

The person in charge of completing the building was Ricardo García Guereta, between 1907 and 1913-1915, according to the source. His contribution is recognized by a treatment that is considerably more conventional than the original design, and it is fair to say, without exaggeration: Guereta completed a building that had been exposed and without an architect for fourteen years, and he did so using the architectural language of his time.

Of the original project, the crowning element was lost along the way. Gaudí had planned a series of angels to top the building. They never went up there: in 1963, they were installed as sculptures in the garden, at ground level. Those who visit the palace see them, but they see them in the wrong place, and almost no signage explains this.

The palace today houses the Museum of the Ways, dedicated to the Way of St. James. There are four different years circulating regarding when it opened: 1954, 1962, 1963, and 1964. The museum itself states 1964, and that is the figure we are using here, but it is worth knowing that there are at least three other dates in circulation. This is not a minor detail: when four sources provide four different dates for a relatively recent and well-documented event such as the opening of a museum, the prudent approach is to cite the date provided by the institution itself and to mention that other dates exist.

The palace is declared a monument by the decree of July 24, 1969, published in the BOE (Official State Gazette) on August 20, the same decree that protected seventeen works by Gaudí at once. And the entire city is a historic site since January 27, 1978, which, in practical terms, means that the area surrounding the palace, including the Roman wall that appears in almost all the photographs, is also protected.

What it lacks is international recognition. Astorga was one of the twelve works that Spain presented to UNESCO in 2005 to expand the "Works of Antoni Gaudí" site, and ICOMOS accepted four. The palace was among the eight that were rejected, along with Casa Botines, El Capricho, and the cathedral of Palma.

It's worth noting what came after. In 1902, Gaudí accepted the renovation of the Palma de Mallorca cathedral, another ecclesiastical commission far from Barcelona, and he also left it unfinished in 1914, after clashing with the contractor and the cathedral chapter. Twice, he was commissioned to work on a church building outside of Catalonia, and both times he left before the project was completed.