Palau de la Música Catalana

The Palau de la Música Catalana was built between 1905 and 1908 to designs by Lluís Domènech i Montaner — the same architect behind Hospital de Sant Pau — commissioned by the Orfeó Català choral society as a home for Catalan choral music at the height of the Renaixença, the Catalan cultural revival movement. Domènech i Montaner had to fit an ambitious concert hall onto an extremely tight, irregular plot hemmed in by neighbouring buildings on a narrow street, and the compromises this forced — natural light had to come from above rather than the sides — produced one of the building's most celebrated features almost by necessity.

That feature is the inverted stained-glass dome skylight above the main concert hall, designed by Antoni Rigalt, which floods the auditorium with coloured light during daytime performances and glows from within at night — widely considered one of the single most beautiful interior details anywhere in Barcelona's Modernisme architecture. The stage is flanked by extraordinary sculptural busts of Wagner and Beethoven alongside a sculpted group representing a flight of Valkyries bursting from the wall, and the whole building is wrapped, inside and out, in mosaic, stained glass, wrought iron and ceramic ornament to a degree that makes it feel closer to a cathedral of music than a functional concert venue.