Park Güell

Park Güell began in 1900 as a failed real-estate venture: industrialist Eusebi Güell hired Gaudí to design an upscale gated housing estate of 60 plots on a scrubby hillside above the city, modelled loosely on the English garden-city movement. Only two showcase houses ever sold (Gaudí himself ended up living in one), the project was abandoned in 1914, and the city bought the unfinished grounds in 1922 and opened them as a public park — meaning almost everything visitors come to see was originally infrastructure and showrooms for houses that were never built.

The result is Gaudí at his most playful and least constrained by a client's practical demands. The main terrace is ringed by a sinuous tiled bench, made from broken ceramic fragments (trencadís) in a technique Gaudí and his collaborator Josep Maria Jujol pioneered here, which functions as both handrail, seating and organic sculpture in one continuous 110-metre wave. Below it, the Hypostyle Room's 86 Doric-style columns were originally meant to be a marketplace for estate residents; today its undulating ceiling of colourful mosaic roundels is one of the most photographed details in the park. Guarding the main staircase is the famous mosaic salamander, nicknamed "El Drac" (the dragon), now the park's unofficial mascot.