Antic Hospital de la Santa Creu: Where Gaudí Died
Why is it significant?
Step into the courtyard and listen. Orange trees, a stone cross, benches with people reading, pigeons, and the tall Gothic walls of an old hospital all around. You are one minute from La Rambla, and it feels like a cloister in a small town.
Key Facts
| Place | Antic Hospital de la Santa Creu: Where Gaudí Died |
|---|---|
| Address | Carrer de l'Hospital 56, 08001 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.38100, 2.16950 |
| Part of Walk | La Rambla and El Raval: Barcelona's River of Sand, Opera Bombs and Gaudí's Last Days |
| Generated | Generated |
Step into the courtyard and listen. Orange trees, a stone cross, benches with people reading, pigeons, and the tall Gothic walls of an old hospital all around. You are one minute from La Rambla, and it feels like a cloister in a small town.
This is the Hospital de la Santa Creu, the Hospital of the Holy Cross. In 1401 Barcelona merged six small medieval hospitals into one great institution here, on what was then the edge of the city. For more than five centuries it took in the sick, the poor, abandoned children and the dying. Its long Gothic wards, with their enormous pointed stone arches, now hold the Biblioteca de Catalunya, the national library of Catalonia, so where patients once lay in rows, readers now sit in silence.
And this is where the story of Antoni Gaudí ended. On 7 June 1926, the 73-year-old architect was hit by a tram on the Gran Via while walking to church. He dressed so shabbily, and carried so little, that nobody recognised him; he was taken for a beggar, and brought to the hospital for the poor. Here, in the old Santa Creu, he died on 10 June. The man who had built palaces for some of the richest families in Barcelona chose, by the way he lived, to end his life among the poorest.
Within a few years the hospital itself was gone. Its successor, the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, a modernista garden city of pavilions by Lluís Domènech i Montaner, took over in 1930, and the old building was handed over to culture. Look for the eighteenth-century college of surgery in the complex, with its round anatomy theatre, where students once watched dissections on a rotating marble table.
There is one more detail, for the curious. Hospitals cost money, and the Santa Creu once held a royal privilege over theatre performances in Barcelona, so that every play staged helped pay for its beds. Keep that in mind for later. Now leave by Carrer de l'Hospital, follow it to La Rambla, and turn left towards the great iron arch of the market.