More works by Gaudí in Barcelona

Five. Six. Nine. Ten. Twelve. Eighteen. Twenty-one. Twenty-three. These are the numbers that different websites list when cataloging "Gaudí's works." None of them explain what they are counting, and that's why they can all be right at the same time: depending on whether or not they include projects that were never built, works outside of Barcelona, disputed attributions, and commissions that Gaudí signed but didn's oversee, the list doubles without anyone being wrong.

Here, the criteria are written before the list, so that they can be discussed. We are including works that are constructed within the municipality of Barcelona and that can be seen today, at least from the outside. With that rule, we have nine buildings, in addition to the four that have their own page on this website: the Sagrada Família, the Park Güell, the Casa Batlló, and Casa Milà.

One of the nine entries is marked with an asterisk, and I explain why in its corresponding row. Another, the Colònia Güell crypt, doesn't meet the criteria because it's not located in Barcelona, but rather in Santa Coloma de Cervelló. However, it still has a page here because it's accessible with a regular transportation ticket, and because it's the site where the Sagrada Família was initially tested and developed.

The projects that never came to fruition, which are numerous and sometimes quite ambitious, are excluded. These include the "Attraction" hotel in New York, the Tangier project with its seventeen parabolic towers, and the twenty Girossi kiosks that the city council approved, but which were abandoned when the concessionaire went bankrupt in 1880. None of these were ever built, so none can be seen.

Excluded are the works located outside the city, which have their own section in El Camino de Gaudí: El Capricho de Comillas, the Casa Botines in León, the Episcopal Palace of Astorga, the cathedral of Palma, and the Nau Gaudí in Mataró.

And then there's what has been demolished, which is the part that no one lists. The Mercè Hall on La Rambla, the only performance space that Gaudí actually created, was demolished on August 4, 1988. The Arab Hall of the Bar Torino closed in 1911, and the building was replaced in 1934 by a building designed by Josep Lluís Sert. The buildings of the Jesús-María convent in Sant Andreu were destroyed during the Tragic Week of 1909, and only a mosaic remains, in the church of Sant Pacià. Of the Damià Mateu tower in Llinars del Vallès, only the fishing net fence survives, having been installed in Park Güell since 1968.

The asterisk. The Gaudí House-Museum is the house where Gaudí lived between 1906 and 1925, but he did not design it. The Park Güell and the Sagrada Família are attributed to Francesc Berenguer; the archive of the Gaudí Chair states that it was "designed jointly." It is on the list because visitors find it and count it, not because it belongs to him. It has been a museum since September 28, 1963, and has been managed by BSM since 2024.

The entire protection column of the table comes from a single administrative act: Decree 1794/1969, of July 24, 1969, which declared seventeen Gaudí works historic-artistic monuments in one go, with consecutive codes. It was an unusual case. The rules of the time required a century of age to protect something, and Gaudí had been dead for forty-three years: he was the first contemporary artist in Spain to achieve it.

That's where an error comes from, which is repeated in tourist brochures and on some official websites, including the website for Casa Vicens itself: the idea of a "Catalan declaration of 1993" distinct from the Spanish one of 1969. There are not two declarations. Law 9/1993 on Catalan cultural heritage renamed the category, and what is called "Bien de Interés Cultural" in Spanish is called "Bé Cultural d'Interès Nacional" in Catalan. The same asset, the same file, two names.

The other protection, UNESCO's, is much narrower than it seems. In 2005 Spain submitted twelve works by Gaudí to extend the 1984 inscription, and ICOMOS accepted four. The eight that were rejected are almost all in this table, and I explain why in detail on the Torre Bellesguard page.

The column that most people need is the fourth, and it's worth reading carefully because it describes four situations that are completely different. Interior visitable includes three: Casa Vicens, Palau Güell, and Torre Bellesguard, plus the crypt of the Colònia Güell, which is outside the city. Building in use includes two: the Teresianas school, which is a school with students inside, and Casa Calvet, which are apartments with a restaurant on the ground floor. Only exterior is the Portal Miralles, which is on the sidewalk and is never closed. And closed are two: the Pavellons de la Finca Güell and the Casa-Museu Gaudí.

Regarding the Pavillons, a word of caution is needed, as their condition has changed several times. They opened to the public in 2015, and since June 2018, they have been officially closed for renovations. We haven't been able to verify the status of the renovations in 2026, so it's advisable to check before you go. The dragon on the gate, which is what most people go to see, can be viewed from the sidewalk and is not dependent on the grounds being open.

It's worth stating plainly: of these nine, Casa Vicens is the one that offers the most value if you're interested in how Gaudí began his career, and Palau Güell if you're curious about how he worked when the client wasn't closely monitoring the budget. You can see Las Teresianas and Portal Miralles in just five minutes, and they don's justify a significant detour unless you're already nearby.

There's a pattern in this list that isn't often mentioned, and it appears as soon as you read the original documents rather than the guides. Of the ten large houses that Gaudí built for private clients, at least five are linked to a woman, and in three of those cases, the building is named after a man.

The Casa Milà was built on a plot of land that Roser Segimon purchased in her name on June 9, 1905, using money inherited from her first husband; the building is called Casa Milà, named after her second husband. The Torre Bellesguard was purchased by Maria Sagués in 1900, and it is protected as "Casa Figueras," named after a husband who had been deceased for thirteen years when construction began. The application for the Casa Calvet was signed by Juliana Pintó in April 1898, who was a widow, and the house is named after her husband. For Casa Vicens, the land came through her mother's inheritance. And in the purchase deed for Casa Batlló, Amàlia Godó is also mentioned.

Very few people write about this aspect, and it's the one that's most needed. Barcelona has a vast amount of modernist architecture that isn's by Gaudí, and a significant portion of it is found on the same routes, in the same streets, and in the same photographs. The result is predictable: there are buildings that have been wrongly attributed to Gaudí for decades, appearing in online posts, cheap guidebooks, and casual conversations.

Of the nine, the one that is the most misleading is the last one. The Cases Ramos are by Jaume Torres i Grau, from 1906, and are located in the Lesseps square, that is to say, exactly where half the world ends that walks up to Park Güell from the metro. Those who arrive there find themselves facing an imposing modernist facade, with balconies and ceramics, just fifteen minutes from Gaudí's park, and they draw the obvious conclusion. The obvious conclusion is false.

The case of the Castell dels Tres Dragons is even more interesting. Domènech i Montaner built it as a restaurant for the 1888 Universal Exposition, and Gaudí also worked on that exposition: he redesigned the Pavilion of the Transatlantic Company in a Nasrid style, which had been dismantled and brought from Cádiz. Gaudí's pavilion disappeared, and there are three incompatible versions circulating about how it disappeared: dismantled in 1888, demolished in the 1920s, or surviving until 1960. Domènech's building still stands in the Ciutadella park, and it inherits this confusion.

There's a fundamental reason why there's so much Modernism clustered together and so much potential for confusion, and that's due to regulations. The municipal ordinances of 1891 increased the buildable area of the Eixample and relaxed restrictions on the design of facades: they allowed for more decorative elements and larger projecting sections, and with that, it became profitable to demolish the small houses and build rental buildings with designer facades. The facades of Passeig de Gràcia are, to a large extent, the result of a change in regulations. I explain the whole story in Gaudí and Catalan Modernism.