Castell dels Tres Dragons: The Café That Became a Workshop
Why is it significant?
Here it is, the red castle: crenellated towers, bare brick, iron beams left visible, and along the top a row of white ceramic shields like the badges of an imaginary order of knights. It looks like a fortress from a children's book... built for an institution far less heroic. A restaurant.
Key Facts
| Place | Castell dels Tres Dragons: The Café That Became a Workshop |
|---|---|
| Address | Passeig de Picasso 5, 08003 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.38810, 2.18340 |
| Part of Walk | From the 1888 Expo to the Catalan Manchester: Ciutadella Park & Poblenou, Barcelona |
| Generated | Generated |
Here it is, the red castle: crenellated towers, bare brick, iron beams left visible, and along the top a row of white ceramic shields like the badges of an imaginary order of knights. It looks like a fortress from a children's book... built for an institution far less heroic. A restaurant.
The architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner designed it as the café-restaurant of the 1888 Exposition. He used brick and exposed iron, materials of factories and railway stations, and he showed the structure instead of hiding it behind plaster. Architects still look at this building as one of the starting points of Catalan Modernisme, years before the famous houses of Passeig de Gràcia.
The irony is that the building, as far as historians can tell, was not finished in time to serve the visitors of the fair. So Domènech found another use for it. After the exposition, he and his colleague Antoni Maria Gallissà turned it into a workshop where craftsmen experimented with ceramics, wrought iron, stained glass and stone carving. Many of the techniques that later decorated the great modernista buildings were tried out right here.
And the name? It is a joke. In 1865 the playwright Frederic Soler, known as Pitarra, staged a popular comic play called El castell dels tres dragons, the Castle of the Three Dragons, and Barcelona simply stuck the title onto this fake castle. Later, for most of the twentieth century, it housed the city's zoology museum, and generations of local children came here to stare at skeletons and stuffed animals.
Today it belongs to the natural sciences museum and is used for research. Look closely at the shields on the top: they were part of the decoration from the start, a medieval costume for a building made with the technology of the industrial age. Now walk deeper into the park, past the lawns and the palm trees, towards the sound of falling water.