Gaudí's Endless Temple to Domènech's Garden Hospital: Sagrada Família & Sant Pau, Barcelona

Circle Barcelona's unfinished basilica façade by façade, from Gaudí's wavy-roofed school to his tomb, then walk the avenue that links two geniuses to the Hospital de Sant Pau, a city of healing pavilions

Barcelona · 11 stops · 25 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. La Monumental: Barcelona's Last Bullring

   Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes 749, 08013 Barcelona, Spain

   Stand on Gran Via and look up at the towers of the round arena in front of you, each one topped by a little dome and, on top of that, a huge glazed egg. Yes, eggs. Blue and white ceramic eggs, perched on the skyline of a bullring as if a giant bird had nested there.

   This is La Monumental, which opened in 1914 and was enlarged and redecorated a couple of years later by the architect Ignasi Mas i Morell. Its style is neo-Mudéjar, the brick-and-tile revival of Spain's Moorish past, but look closely and you will see the playful hand of Barcelona's modernisme in it: broken tile, curves, colour, and those eggs, which nobody has ever fully explained.

   For most of the twentieth century this was the city's great arena, and not only for bulls. On the 3rd of July 1965 the Beatles played here, on their only tour of Spain, to a crowd that by many accounts was smaller than expected and more puzzled than hysterical. Tickets were expensive, police were nervous, and Franco's Spain was not quite ready for screaming.

   Then came the decline of bullfighting in Catalonia. The regional Parliament voted to ban it in 2010, and on the 25th of September 2011 the last corrida took place here, with the star matador José Tomás on the bill. The ban was later overturned in court, but the gates of La Monumental have stayed shut to the bulls, and the city keeps arguing about what this great empty drum should become.

   Now turn to face the mountains and look up Carrer de la Marina. At the end of the street, above the rooftops, you can already see them: the spires of the Sagrada Família, rising out of the grid like something that grew rather than something that was built. Walk up Carrer de la Marina towards them, and stop at the crossing with Carrer d'Aragó.

2. 2. Carrer de la Marina: Cerdà's Grid and the First Glimpse

   Carrer de la Marina / Carrer d'Aragó, 08013 Barcelona, Spain

   Pause in the middle of the crossroads and notice its shape. The four corners are not sharp: each building is sliced off at an angle, so the junction opens into a small octagonal square. Up the street, the spires of the Sagrada Família fill the far end of the view.

   Those cut corners are the signature of the Eixample, the Extension, the grid that covers this part of Barcelona. Its author was Ildefons Cerdà, an engineer who studied the city's death rates and its cramped, airless old streets before he drew a single line. His plan was approved in 1860: streets twenty metres wide, square blocks of about 113 metres a side, and those chamfered corners, so that carts, and later trams, could turn and so that everyone could see what was coming.

   Cerdà had a dream that the city did not keep. He wanted blocks built on only two or three sides, with gardens in the middle, open to the sun. Developers had other ideas, and over the decades almost every block was closed and filled in. Only recently has Barcelona begun to reopen some of those courtyards as small public gardens.

   When the first stone of the Sagrada Família was laid in 1882, this part of the grid existed mostly on paper. The site belonged to the village of Sant Martí de Provençals, among fields and scattered houses, and was only absorbed into Barcelona in 1897. The founders chose it because the land was cheap. The church came first, and the neighbourhood grew up around it, block by block, so that today it is impossible to imagine the place without the towers.

   And notice how the streets work as frames. Cerdà's straight lines were never designed with the basilica in mind, and yet they give you these perfect long views, the towers appearing at the end of a corridor of balconies. Keep walking up Carrer de la Marina for two more blocks, and stop on Carrer de Mallorca, in front of the side of the church that is still missing.

3. 3. The Glory Façade: The Front Door Still to Come

   Carrer de Mallorca 401, 08013 Barcelona, Spain

   Stand on the pavement of Carrer de Mallorca and look across at the side of the basilica facing you. Columns, scaffolding, a few bronze doors, and above them towers soaring into the air... but something is missing. This is meant to be the front of the church, and the front has not been built yet.

   This will be the Glory Façade, the main entrance and the largest of the three façades. Gaudí knew he would never see it. He left drawings and ideas for it: death, judgement, hell below, glory above, and a vast porch held up by columns, crowded with the virtues and the sins of humanity. Generations of architects since his death have been working out how to turn those ideas into stone.

   Some of it is already here. Look at the great bronze doors of the central portal, made by the sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs. They carry the Lord's Prayer in Catalan, and the line give us this day our daily bread is repeated in fifty languages. If you look carefully you may find your own.

   And then there is the staircase problem. The design calls for a monumental flight of steps rising from the street towards this entrance. To build it as imagined, the steps would have to cross Carrer de Mallorca and land on the block where you are standing, a block full of apartment buildings, where families have lived for decades. The basilica's foundation and the City have been talking about it for years, and many residents are understandably nervous. It is the oldest question in this neighbourhood: who gets to live next door to an unfinished masterpiece?

   So enjoy this side while it still looks like a construction site. In a few decades, it may be the most photographed doorway in Europe. Now walk left along Carrer de Mallorca to the corner with Carrer de Sardenya, where a small brick building with a roof like a wave sits in the shadow of the towers.

4. 4. Escoles de la Sagrada Família: Gaudí's Wavy School

   Carrer de Mallorca 401 (corner of Carrer de Sardenya), 08013 Barcelona, Spain

   Find the low brick building at the corner of the site, so small beside the towers that many visitors walk straight past it. Then look at its roof. It ripples. The walls ripple too, in and out, like a curtain moving in a breeze.

   These are the Escoles de la Sagrada Família, the schools, built by Gaudí in 1909 for the children of the men working on the temple and of the families in the neighbourhood. It was meant to be temporary and it had to be cheap, so he used the humblest material there is: thin, flat Catalan bricks, laid in a few layers. And then he made them do something extraordinary.

   The trick is geometry. Each wave of the roof and the walls is a surface made entirely of straight lines, arranged so that together they curve. A curved surface is stiffer than a flat one, so a wall barely the thickness of a few bricks can stand on its own, and the roof sheds rainwater down its own valleys. When the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier visited Barcelona in 1928, he stopped here and sketched it in his notebook. The prophet of concrete boxes, drawing a brick wave.

   The building has had a hard life. It was burned during the violence of 1936, at the beginning of the Civil War, and later restored. It has been taken apart and moved more than once, to make room for the growing basilica, and it arrived at this corner in 2002. Today it holds an exhibition about the school and about how Gaudí taught himself, and others, to think in curves.

   There is something touching about this little building. Next to the greatest construction project in Spain, the first thing Gaudí made for the neighbourhood was a classroom. Now cross Carrer de Sardenya into the garden square opposite, and turn around to face the angular, almost skeletal façade above you.

5. 5. The Passion Façade from Plaça de la Sagrada Família

   Plaça de la Sagrada Família, 08013 Barcelona, Spain

   Find a spot in the square where you can see the whole western façade at once: six great slanting columns like bones or bare tree trunks, a heavy overhanging porch, and figures carved in hard, angular planes, almost like cubist woodcuts. It is the opposite of the soft, dripping stone you may have seen in photos.

   This is the Passion Façade, which tells the story of the last days and the death of Christ. Gaudí designed it to be harsh on purpose. He said, in effect, that it should frighten people, with light and shadow cutting like a knife. Work began in 1954 from his drawings, and from 1987 the sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs spent nearly two decades filling it with figures.

   Subirachs's style divided Barcelona. Some called it a betrayal of Gaudí; others said Gaudí himself had wanted each generation to leave its own mark. Read the scenes like a zigzag, starting low on the left with the Last Supper and climbing in an S-shape towards the Crucifixion near the top.

   Now look for two hidden things. To the left of the main door there is a square grid of numbers carved into the stone. Add up any row, column or diagonal and you get 33, the age of Christ at his death. And look at the helmets of the Roman soldiers: their shapes are borrowed from Gaudí's own chimneys on the roof of La Pedrera. Somewhere among the figures, Subirachs even placed a small portrait of Gaudí himself, notebook in hand, as if he were watching the scene and taking notes.

   High above, the towers of the apostles rise in fours, their tops covered in coloured mosaic and crowned with mitres and crosses, and the tall central towers keep climbing behind them. Now walk round the corner to the right, along Carrer de Provença, to the back of the church, where it all began.

6. 6. The Apse and the Crypt: Where Gaudí Lies

   Carrer de Provença 450, 08013 Barcelona, Spain

   Walk along the back of the church on Carrer de Provença and look at the rounded wall of the apse, ringed with pointed pinnacles. It looks more medieval than the rest, and that is no accident: you are looking at the oldest part of the building, and under it, the crypt.

   The first stone was laid on the 19th of March 1882, Saint Joseph's day, and the first architect was not Gaudí at all. Francisco de Paula del Villar planned a fairly ordinary neo-Gothic church. He quarrelled with the promoters and left, and in 1883 the job went to a thirty-one-year-old architect with very little to his name. Antoni Gaudí would spend the next forty-three years here.

   By the end of his life the temple had swallowed him completely. He dressed shabbily, lived for his work, and in his last months slept in his studio on the site. On the 7th of June 1926, walking to evening prayers, he was hit by a tram on Gran Via. Nobody recognised the old man in worn clothes, and he was taken, like a pauper, to the old Hospital de la Santa Creu in the Raval. He died there three days later. Half of Barcelona followed his coffin, and he was buried here, in the crypt, in the chapel of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

   Ten years later, in July 1936, as the Civil War broke out, the crypt was set on fire and Gaudí's studio was ransacked. Drawings and photographs burned, and his plaster models were smashed to pieces. For decades, patient architects have reassembled those fragments like a jigsaw, and much of what has been built since rests on them.

   The Church has opened a cause for Gaudí's beatification, and in 2025 the Vatican declared him Venerable, the first step on that road. Keep an eye on the pinnacles of the apse: snails, lizards and other little creatures crawl down them, a sculptor's joke in a very serious building. Now carry on round the corner, cross Carrer de la Marina into Plaça de Gaudí, and find the pond.

7. 7. Plaça de Gaudí: The Nativity Façade in the Pond

   Plaça de Gaudí, Carrer de la Marina 278, 08013 Barcelona, Spain

   Walk to the far side of the pond, turn around and look into the water. There it is, upside down and trembling: the Nativity Façade, its four spires doubled in the pond. This is the photograph everybody takes, and for good reason.

   It all started with a bookseller. Josep Maria Bocabella, a devout publisher of religious books, led a society of devotees of Saint Joseph, and in 1881 they bought this land with the idea of an expiatory temple, a church paid for entirely by donations, as an act of atonement. That rule still holds. No state budget has ever paid for the building. Alms, and today the tickets of millions of visitors, keep the cranes moving.

   Now look at the façade itself. Gaudí chose to build this one first, the joyful one, the birth of Christ. Three portals, for Faith, Hope and Charity, and in the middle a green cypress tree, the tree of life, with white doves resting on it. At the foot of two columns, a sea turtle on the side nearer the sea and a land tortoise on the side nearer the mountains hold the whole thing up. Chameleons cling to the corners. Many of the angels and musicians were carved by Etsuro Sotoo, a Japanese sculptor who has worked here since 1978.

   Gaudí saw only one of these towers finished, the bell tower of Saint Barnabas, completed in 1925, a year before he died. He reportedly joked that his client was not in a hurry. In 2005 this façade and the crypt were added to UNESCO's list of Gaudí's World Heritage works, and in 2010 Pope Benedict XVI consecrated the church as a basilica. Surprisingly, it only received a formal building licence from the City in 2019, after more than a century of construction.

   Take one more look at the reflection. Then walk to the top corner of the square, where Carrer de la Marina meets Carrer de Provença, and step onto the wide pedestrian avenue heading away from the basilica.

8. 8. Avinguda de Gaudí: The Avenue Between Two Geniuses

   Avinguda de Gaudí 10, 08025 Barcelona, Spain

   Walk a few steps onto the avenue and look straight ahead. Between two rows of trees and café terraces, the street runs dead straight, and at its far end, almost a kilometre away, a cluster of domes and spires glows red and gold. Behind you, the Sagrada Família. In front, the Hospital de Sant Pau.

   Notice that this avenue cuts the Eixample grid at an angle. It is a diagonal, laid out to link the two great monuments of the neighbourhood, and much of it was later handed over to pedestrians. It carries Gaudí's name, but the building at the other end belongs to his great contemporary, Lluís Domènech i Montaner.

   Look at the tall, branching lampposts near the start of the avenue, wrought in iron with clusters of lamps and touches of coloured tile. They were designed by Pere Falqués, the city architect who also gave Passeig de Gràcia its famous tiled benches with lamps. These were made for another corner of the city in the early twentieth century and found a new home on this avenue much later. Barcelona moves its furniture around like a family rearranging the living room.

   Now for the human story. Domènech was two years older than Gaudí, and while Gaudí was a student at Barcelona's School of Architecture, Domènech was already teaching there. He later became its director. Legend says that when Gaudí graduated in 1878, the head of the school remarked that they had just given the title either to a madman or to a genius, and that time would tell. It is probably too good to be entirely true... but time did tell.

   The two men had very different temperaments. Domènech was a politician, a scholar and a teamworker who ran a workshop of craftsmen. Gaudí was a solitary, deeply religious perfectionist. This avenue is the line between their two worlds. Walk on along it for a few hundred metres, then stop and turn back to look at the towers.

9. 9. Looking Back: The Towers Still Rising

   Avinguda de Gaudí 50, 08025 Barcelona, Spain

   Stop here, halfway along the avenue, and turn around. This is the view of the Sagrada Família that the city itself was arranged to give you: the trees parting like curtains and the whole cluster of towers framed at the end of the street.

   Count what you can see. Gaudí planned eighteen towers. Twelve for the apostles, four on each façade, four taller ones for the evangelists, one for the Virgin Mary, and in the centre the tallest of all, the Tower of Jesus Christ. For decades only the eight apostle towers of the two side façades stood, and people assumed the rest would never come.

   Then the pace changed. Computers, new stone-cutting machines and the money from millions of tickets made the impossible routine. In December 2021 the Tower of the Virgin Mary was completed, crowned with a twelve-pointed star that lights up at night. The towers of the four evangelists followed, topped with their symbols: the angel, the lion, the ox and the eagle.

   And then the central tower. Its planned height is 172.5 metres, which would make the Sagrada Família the tallest church in the world. The goal was to crown it with its great cross in 2026, the centenary of Gaudí's death. By the time you hear this, the cross may already stand at the top, or the last pieces may still be going up... look for yourself. Either way, the main Glory façade and its towers will take years longer.

   Why 172.5 metres? The story goes that Gaudí wanted his church to stay just below the height of Montjuïc, the hill by the sea, because, as he put it, the work of man should not rise above the work of God. Now turn around again and walk on to the end of the avenue, where the red-brick hospital is waiting across the road.

10. 10. Hospital de Sant Pau: The Administration Pavilion

    Carrer de Sant Antoni Maria Claret 167, 08025 Barcelona, Spain

    Cross to the gates and take in the building facing you: a long palace of red brick with a clock tower, its walls dressed in stone, mosaics, coloured tiles and sculpted angels. It hardly looks like a hospital. That was exactly the idea.

    This is the Administration Pavilion of the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, and its double name holds two stories. The Santa Creu, the Holy Cross, was Barcelona's great medieval hospital, founded in 1401 in the Raval. By the nineteenth century it was hopelessly overcrowded and unhealthy. And yes, it was in that old hospital that Gaudí died in 1926, while the new one was rising here, at the other end of his avenue.

    The Sant Pau comes from a banker, Pau Gil, who made his fortune in Paris and died in 1896. He left a large part of it to build a modern hospital in Barcelona, on one condition: that it carry the name of his patron saint, Saint Paul. The commission went to Lluís Domènech i Montaner, and construction began in 1902.

    Look at the façade carefully. The mosaics tell the history of the hospital, from its founding to Pau Gil's will, and the sculpture and tilework come from the same team of craftsmen Domènech gathered for his other masterpiece, the Palau de la Música Catalana. The two buildings were inscribed together on UNESCO's World Heritage list in 1997.

    The money ran out long before the dream did. Pau Gil's bequest paid for only part of the plan, and the works dragged on. Domènech died in 1923, and his son, Pere Domènech i Roura, completed the hospital, which was finished in 1930. Now go through the main entrance and into the grounds behind this building, where the real surprise of Sant Pau begins.

11. 11. Sant Pau's Garden of Pavilions

    Sant Pau Recinte Modernista, Carrer de Sant Antoni Maria Claret 167, 08025 Barcelona, Spain

    Walk out among the pavilions and stop on the central path. Around you stand separate buildings, each with its own domes, ceramic roofs and turrets, set among gardens, trees and flowerbeds. It feels less like a hospital than a small town designed by a jeweller.

    That is the whole point. At the beginning of the twentieth century, doctors believed that air, light and greenery helped patients heal, and that crowding spread infection. So Domènech refused to build one huge block. He split the hospital into pavilions, each one a ward, standing apart from the others, with gardens in between for patients to walk and breathe in.

    Notice also that the whole complex sits at an angle to the city grid outside. Domènech turned it, so that its buildings would catch the sun and the breeze better than Cerdà's streets allowed. The avenue you have just walked shares that angle, running along the hospital's axis straight back towards the Sagrada Família. And underneath your feet, a network of tunnels links the pavilions, so that patients, doctors and supplies could move between them out of sight and out of the weather.

    The hospital worked here for about eighty years. In 2009 the medical services moved into a new building just to the north, and the old pavilions went through a long, careful restoration. They reopened from 2014 as a heritage site and a home for international organisations working on health, sustainability and education. So the buildings still serve the same idea, in a new form: making life better.

    Look back down the axis now, through the gates, along the avenue, to the towers on the horizon. You have walked from one masterpiece to the other: from a church that has been rising for nearly a century and a half, to a hospital where beauty itself was meant to be medicine. Two architects, one avenue, and a neighbourhood that grew up between them. Stay a while in the gardens... this is a good place to end.