Gaudí buildings in Barcelona: all the works you can see, in order, from Casa Vicens to the Sagrada Família

Architecture · 4 September 2026

Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) built almost everything he ever built in and around Barcelona, and the city has fourteen of his works, seven of them together on the UNESCO World Heritage list: Park Güell, Palau Güell, Casa Milà, Casa Vicens, Casa Batlló, the crypt of the Colònia Güell and the Nativity facade and crypt of the Sagrada Família. They run from the Moorish tiled Casa Vicens of 1883 to the church he spent his last twelve years on and which is still being finished, and the pattern in between, from straight lines and patterns borrowed from Islam and the Gothic to buildings with no straight line at all, is his own invention: a way of building on curved, leaning columns and vaults he worked out with hanging chains and wet plaster models rather than drawings. Below: every building in the order he built it, what makes them Gaudí, how he designed, tickets and an itinerary, and the stories, with the houses in the Buildings by style collection.

The early works, 1883–1900

• Casa Vicens (1883–85), Gràcia. His first house, for a tile manufacturer: a brick summer villa with green-and-white checkerboard tiles, iron palm-leaf gates and Moorish ceilings, opened as a museum in 2017. Casa Vicens.
• Güell Pavilions (1884–87), Pedralbes. The gatehouse and stables of his patron's estate, with the wrought-iron dragon gate, the first of his dragons.
• Palau Güell (1886–88), off La Rambla. A town palace for Eusebi Güell: a dark stone facade with two parabolic-arched gates for carriages, a central hall three storeys high under a perforated dome, and a roof of twenty chimneys covered in broken tile, the first of his roofscapes. Open as a museum.
• Colegio Teresiano (1888–89), Sant Gervasi. A convent school on a tiny budget, brick with a corridor of parabolic arches; still a school, exterior only.
• Casa Calvet (1898–1900), Eixample. His most conventional building, a Baroque-flavoured apartment house that won the city's building prize in 1900; the ground floor is a restaurant.
• Bellesguard (1900–09), Tibidabo. A castle-like house on the site of a medieval king's palace, stone and brick with a needle spire; open to visit.

Park Güell, 1900–1914

Eusebi Güell bought a bare hillside above the city and asked Gaudí to lay out an English-style garden suburb of sixty houses; only two were built, one of them Gaudí's own home for twenty years, now the Gaudí House Museum, and in 1926 the family gave the failed estate to the city as a park. What Gaudí built is the infrastructure: the two gingerbread gate lodges, the double stair with the mosaic dragon, a hall of 86 Doric columns meant as a market, whose roof is the great terrace with its serpentine bench of broken tile, "trencadís", designed by his assistant Josep Maria Jujol, and three kilometres of paths on viaducts of rough stone columns leaning like trees. The bench and the terrace are the most photographed Gaudí; the "monumental zone" has a timed ticket and the rest of the park is free. Park Güell.

Casa Batlló and Casa Milà, 1904–1912

Casa Batlló (1904–06) on Passeig de Gràcia was an existing apartment house that Gaudí remodelled for the textile magnate Josep Batlló: a facade of bone-like stone columns and balconies like masks, a skin of broken glass and ceramic discs in blues and greens, and a roof ridged like a dragon's back, with a turret and cross for the lance of St George, Catalonia's patron. Inside, a light well tiled in blue that darkens toward the bottom so it looks even from every floor, and a first-floor "noble" apartment of wooden waves, all open as a museum. Three doors away is the rival Casa Amatller by Puig i Cadafalch, and the block is called the "Block of Discord". Casa Milà (1906–12), "La Pedrera", the stone quarry, at the next corner, is a whole apartment building on two courtyards with a facade of undulating limestone hung on an iron frame, so that no wall inside carries load and the plan of every flat is different; balconies of twisted iron seaweed, attic of 270 brick parabolic arches, and the roof of chimneys like helmeted warriors that George Lucas is said to have looked at for his stormtroopers. The Milà family hated it, the city fined it for exceeding the height limit, and it is now a museum with the attic and roof open. Casa Milà.

The Colònia Güell crypt and the Sagrada Família

At Güell's textile colony at Santa Coloma de Cervelló, 20 km from the city, Gaudí spent ten years (1898–1908) on the model for a church and four (1908–14) building only its crypt before Güell's money ran out: a low hall of leaning basalt columns and brick vaults, with windows like wings, that is the laboratory for everything in the Sagrada Família and the best place to understand him. The Sagrada Família itself was begun in 1882 by another architect as a neo-Gothic church; Gaudí took it over in 1883, aged 31, and reworked it into a church with eighteen towers, tree-like branching columns and a nave 45 m high, of which he built the crypt, the apse and the Nativity facade with its four towers, one finished in his lifetime. He worked on nothing else after 1914, lived in the workshop, and was killed by a tram in 1926, buried in the crypt. The building has gone on for a century on ticket money, guided by his plaster models, with the central tower of Jesus Christ, 172.5 m, due to make it the tallest church in the world; the completion date and the arguments about it are in when the Sagrada Família will be finished.

What makes a building Gaudí

• No straight lines. "The straight line belongs to men, the curved line to God": facades, roofs, walls and furniture undulate.
• Nature as engineer. Columns that lean like trees and branch like trees, vaults like leaves, and the shapes of bones, waves, dragons and shells everywhere.
• Parabolic arches and catenary vaults. The arch that a hanging chain makes, turned upside down, stands with no buttresses; it appears from the Palau Güell gates to the attic of La Pedrera.
• Trencadís. Broken tile and glass mosaic, which lets a flat colour wrap a curved surface; the bench of Park Güell, the roofs of Batlló and Güell.
• Design by model. For the Colònia Güell church he hung a model upside down from the ceiling, strings weighted with bags of shot, photographed it and turned the photograph over: the chains found the shape that carries pure compression. His drawings were few; his workshop was full of plaster.
• Craft. Wrought iron, carpentry, ceramics and stained glass by Barcelona workshops, with Jujol on the colour; the buildings are as much the city's craftsmen's as his.
• Catalan symbols. St George's dragon, the four bars of the Catalan flag, and after 1900 Catholic imagery in every roof and railing.

The style is Catalan Modernisme, the local branch of Art Nouveau, and Gaudí's contemporaries Domènech i Montaner, with the Palau de la Música Catalana and the Hospital de Sant Pau, and Puig i Cadafalch, built the rest of it; the movement across Europe is in Art Nouveau vs Art Deco.

How to see them

Six sites sell timed tickets and book out in season: Sagrada Família, Park Güell's monumental zone, Casa Batlló, La Pedrera, Palau Güell and Casa Vicens; Bellesguard, the Colònia Güell crypt and the Gaudí House Museum in the park are smaller. A workable day: Sagrada Família at opening, walk twenty minutes to Park Güell for late morning, then the metro to Passeig de Gràcia for Casa Batlló and La Pedrera in the afternoon, with Casa Calvet on the way; Palau Güell and Casa Vicens fit a second morning, the Colònia Güell a half-day by suburban train. The Casa Batlló and La Pedrera roofs are the best in the evening. Everything is open every day except a few holidays, and children under a certain age are free at most; the Sagrada Família towers need a separate ticket and a lift.

Versions and theories

• Was Gaudí a mystic or an engineer? Both. He went to mass daily, fasted almost to death in 1894, and is a candidate for sainthood since 1992; his structures are also the most rigorous of their time, and the Sagrada Família's builders found his hyperboloid geometry could be computed and cut by machine.
• Did he leave plans? Few, and the workshop, with his models, was burned by anarchists in 1936; the models were pieced back from fragments and photographs, and critics from Le Corbusier's generation to today have argued the building since 1936 is a fake. The Nativity facade and crypt, his own, are the World Heritage part.
• The tram. He was hit on the Gran Via on 7 June 1926, taken for a beggar because of his shabby clothes and refused by taxis, and died three days later in the paupers' hospital; identified next day by the chaplain of the Sagrada Família. Documented.
• Stormtroopers and La Pedrera. Often repeated, never sourced; the chimneys do look like helmets.
• Dragon or carnival? Casa Batlló's roof is read as the dragon of St George pierced by the cross; Gaudí never said so, and some see a carnival mask and confetti. The house is happy with both.

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