Park Güell

The park carries the name of Eusebi Güell, a Barcelona industrialist who owned the El Vapor Vell textile works and the Asland cement company. He sat as a deputy in the Cortes in 1878 and was made a count by Alfonso XIII in 1910. His association with Antoni Gaudí began in 1878, when a display cabinet the young architect had made for the Comella glove shop caught his eye at the Paris Universal Exposition; he went on to commission the Palau Güell, the Güell pavilions and the crypt at Colònia Güell, without interfering in Gaudí's artistic decisions.

Güell assembled the site from two estates on the Muntanya Pelada, the Bare Mountain now called the Turó del Carmel: Can Muntaner de Dalt, bought in 1899, and Can Coll i Pujol in 1902. He wanted an English garden city for the Barcelona bourgeoisie, after the theories of Ebenezer Howard — the English spelling of Park in the name is a trace of it.

Work began in November 1900. Soon afterwards prehistoric caves were found at the Turó de les Menes, and the geologist Norberto Font i Sagué examined their layers, identifying fossil hedgehog, rodents, rhinoceros, deer and tortoise, with no evidence of human presence.

Gaudí surveyed the ground with a clinometer and drew it at 1:1000, helped by Julián Bardier. His collaborators included Josep Maria Jujol, Francesc Berenguer and Joan Rubió. Levelling, the streets, the boundary wall, the entrance pavilions, the entrance stairway, the paths and viaducts and the drainage were carried out between 1900 and 1903, the show house in 1904–1906, the Casa Trias in 1905 and the hypostyle hall in 1908–1909; the Greek theatre with its undulating bench, designed by Jujol, went up between 1907 and 1913. The building licence was granted only on 21 November 1904, on a report by the municipal architect Miquel Pascual.

Though the plots did not sell, the park drew visitors from the start. Admission cost 50 céntimos at the porter's lodge, and Güell's permission let people in free. The Centre Excursionista de Catalunya came in 1902 and the architects' association in 1903; the First Congress of the Catalan Language held its garden party there in 1906, and in 1907 a festival of associations raised money for the victims of that year's floods. In 1911 the Women's Federation against Tuberculosis held a festival there, the year the infanta Paz de Borbón and her daughter Pilar visited. The Valencian Regionalist Centre met there in 1913, and the grounds became a usual place for dances, above all sardanas.

The scheme offered about sixty triangular plots of 1,200 to 1,400 square metres, of which only a sixth could be built on. At 0.75 to 1 peseta the square palm a plot cost between 23,000 and 37,000 pesetas, dear for the time, and Barcelonans found the barely built-up hillside too far from a centre whose fashion was for the new blocks of the Eixample. Two plots sold. The show house of 1904, by Gaudí's collaborator Francesc Berenguer, found no buyer until Güell persuaded Gaudí to take it with his own savings; the architect lived there with his father and niece from 1906 until 1925, and the house became the Gaudí House Museum in 1963. The other was the Casa Trias, built in 1905 by Juli Batllevell for the lawyer Martí Trias i Domènech.

By about 1906 it was clear the development would not sell. The failure has been blamed on the general strike of 1902 and the political instability that followed it, on the park's declared Catalanism, and on the severity of Güell's building and management rules, but the cause is not settled. Work on the common areas continued until 1914, when it stopped after the outbreak of the First World War.

Güell died in 1918 and his heirs resolved to sell the park to Barcelona city council as a public space. The council paid a first instalment of 500,000 pesetas to the company the heirs had formed, after Gaudí's death in 1926, and the public park was inaugurated on 26 April 1926. Casa Larrard, the seventeenth-century farmhouse on the estate where Güell had lived and which Gaudí altered between 1906 and 1922, became a primary school, named for General Primo de Rivera and since 1982 for Baldiri Reixac.

The park was declared a national historic-artistic monument in 1969 and inscribed by UNESCO in 1984 within the Works of Antoni Gaudí, alongside the Palau Güell and the Casa Milà. Elías Torres and José Antonio Martínez Lapeña restored it between 1987 and 1994. Since October 2013 the monumental zone has been ticketed, with free entry for residents of Barcelona.