Casa de les Punxes: The House of Spikes

Why is it significant?

Before you stands a castle that seems to have strayed out of a northern fairy tale: red brick, pale stone, steep gables and six towers capped with sharp conical spires. Barcelonans have always called it Casa de les Punxes, the House of Spikes, although its proper name is Casa Terrades.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Before you stands a castle that seems to have strayed out of a northern fairy tale: red brick, pale stone, steep gables and six towers capped with sharp conical spires. Barcelonans have always called it Casa de les Punxes, the House of Spikes, although its proper name is Casa Terrades.

It was designed by Josep Puig i Cadafalch, the architect of Casa Amatller, and built between 1903 and 1905 for three sisters of the Terrades family. Each sister owned her own plot, and Puig had a clever idea: build three separate houses but wrap them in one continuous fortress, so that from the street it reads as a single building. It fills an entire triangular block, one of those odd shapes created where the Diagonal cuts through the grid.

Look for the ceramic panels high on the façades. One shows Saint George, and beneath him runs a line in Catalan that means Holy patron of Catalonia, give us back our freedom. In the early twentieth century that was a political statement, and Puig i Cadafalch was a political man. He later presided over the Mancomunitat, which from 1914 brought Catalonia's four provinces together under one shared institution.

Step back and take in the whole walk. You began in a square that was once forbidden ground outside the walls, crossed a grid that Barcelona never asked for, watched three architects fight over one block, and saw a painter's wire cloud, a quarry of waves, a Parisian palace and a house with two faces. Almost all of it was built in about thirty years, on fortunes made from cotton mills, chocolate, banking and trade with the Americas.

And none of it was ever safe. For decades in the twentieth century Modernisme was dismissed as old-fashioned kitsch, and some of these buildings were mutilated or came close to demolition. Today they are the very face of the city. Diagonal metro station is a few minutes back along the avenue... and if you still have energy, Gràcia, the old village at the top of Passeig de Gràcia, is waiting just across the road.