Park Güell

The Park Güell has a biography that is inconsistent with what it is today. It was not conceived as a park, nor as a work of art, nor for the public: it was a real estate venture. Eusebi Güell had purchased a barren hillside in Muntanya Pelada, outside the city, and wanted to sell plots of land to affluent families who wanted to escape the smoke of the expansion area. He commissioned Gaudí to develop the area in 1900, and the construction lasted fourteen years.

The commercial outcome was a disaster. Of the sixty plots planned, only one was sold to a buyer not involved in the project: the lawyer Martí Trias i Domènech, in 1902, who also commissioned his house to another architect. The second house within the complex was the pilot house that the developer had built to showcase the project; it also failed to find a buyer and ended up in the hands of the Gaudí family in 1906. The architect lived there for almost twenty years.

Why wasn't it sold? For the usual reasons. It was far from the city center and difficult to access; public transportation didn't reach it; the price was high; and the Barcelona bourgeoisie, which was the target clientele for Güell, preferred to live on Passeig de Gracia, where the theaters and other wealthy people were. You go to a hillside with a view for a day trip, not to live there.

The construction work was halted in 1914. Güell died in 1918, and his heirs offered the land to the City Council, which approved the purchase on 26 de mayo de 1922. The park opened to the public in 1926, the same year that Gaudí died. In 1984, UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site, in the first group of three works, along with the Palau Güell and the Casa Milà.

Here's the most common confusion, and it costs a lot of people money. Park Güell is not a paid attraction. What you pay for is one specific part, the regulated zone, which groups the five features that show up in the photos. The rest of the park, which is most of its area, is free public space, open like any other park in Barcelona.

Inside the regulated zone you enter at an assigned time, the route is one-way and capacity is limited to 1,400 people per hour. That figure explains why tickets sell out in high season and why you can't go back in once you've left. The practical details are on the tickets and rules page.

An exception that almost no one knows: In the early morning and late afternoon, the regulated area is open to everyone, outside of the tourist sales hours. This is a decision by the City Council to ensure that the park remains a part of the neighborhood.

It's worth reading all four articles in sequence because it's a rare case where the uncertainty is more interesting than the answer itself.

What is documented is who actually created it, and it wasn't just Gaudí. A significant portion of the park's mosaic work, including the 110-meter undulating bench in the plaza and the medallions on the ceiling of the Hypostyle Hall, are designs and creations of Josep Maria Jujol, a collaborator of Gaudí and an architect of considerable merit in his own right. Attributing all of the mosaic work to Gaudí is the most common oversimplification regarding the park.

The regulated zone takes a good hour to walk around if there's no line. The essentials are the stairway with the figure, the Hypostyle Room with its Doric columns leaning outward, the Nature Square that rests on top of it, and the bench that runs along its edge. The detail almost nobody notices: the ceiling of the Hypostyle Room serves as the floor of the square, and all the rainwater that falls on the square runs down inside the columns to a 1,200-cubic-meter cistern. The park has collected its own water since 1914.

The useful stop is Lesseps, on the green line of the metro. From there, it's just over a kilometer, and that kilometer climbs about fifty meters. The park indicates a twenty-minute walk, which is more than a map would suggest, and the difference is exactly the incline. Telling someone who arrives just in time avoids them missing their turn.

Here are two warnings that are circulating incorrectly online. The Bus Güell, the shuttle that used to depart from Alfons X, no longer exists, but the page that advertised it still appears in search engines, and there are resellers who copy it exactly. And the ascent via Vallcarca, the one with the escalators, is now discouraged by the park itself because those escalators are out of service.