Barcelona’s architectural reputation is built almost entirely on one man, which is unfair to about a dozen others and inconvenient for visitors, because it funnels everybody into the same three ticket queues. Gaudí worked inside a movement, and his contemporaries produced buildings that are as extraordinary, considerably emptier and noticeably cheaper. Here is what to see and where.
What modernisme was
The Catalan version of art nouveau, running roughly from the 1880s to the 1910s, and it was a movement rather than a style: architects, ceramicists, glassmakers, ironworkers and sculptors working together on buildings where the decoration is structural and the structure is decorative.
It coincided with money. Barcelona was expanding and its industrial families were building, which is why an entire district is full of it.
It was nationalist as well as aesthetic. Catalan identity, motifs and craft traditions are woven through it deliberately.
Gaudí was the most radical of them, and several others were arguably better at making buildings that work as buildings.
The two you should actually visit
The concert hall in the old town is the one to prioritise. A working concert venue whose auditorium is enclosed in stained glass, with an inverted glass dome shedding daylight into the hall and sculpture bursting out of the walls and the stage. It is a UNESCO site, it is still used for its purpose, and it is one of the most remarkable interiors in Europe.
The former hospital complex near the basilica is the other. Rather than one building it is a campus of pavilions in gardens, richly tiled and domed, built on the theory that beautiful surroundings help people recover. It is enormous, it is quiet, and visitors routinely say it was the surprise of their trip.
Both are ticketed, both cost less than the Gaudí houses, and neither requires booking weeks ahead.
The block of three
On the main boulevard, one block holds houses by three leading modernista architects standing beside each other, including one by Gaudí. They were built within a few years, for competing families, in violently different interpretations of the same movement.
It has a nickname meaning discord, which is exactly right.
It is free. Standing on the pavement opposite and comparing three answers to the same brief is one of the best ten minutes in Barcelona and costs nothing.
One of the three is Casa Batlló, which you may already be planning to enter; our comparison of Casa Batlló and Casa Milà covers whether to pay to go inside.
The free version, which is most of it
The great majority of modernisme in Barcelona is not a museum. It is housing.
One district in particular was built during the movement’s peak and is full of apartment blocks with tiled facades, carved doorways, wrought-iron balconies and stained-glass entrance halls, most of them still lived in.
Walk and look up. Doorways are the best of it, and many entrance halls are visible through glass.
Old shopfronts and pharmacies from the period survive across the city, some still trading, with original woodwork and glass.
Take an hour with no destination. This is one of the few sightseeing activities in Barcelona with no queue, no ticket and no crowd.
How it fits into a trip
On a first visit, do the Gaudí headline sites and add one of the two big non-Gaudí interiors, most usefully the concert hall because it is central.
On a second visit, reverse it. The hospital complex and the concert hall plus a walk through the district is a better day than repeating the queues.
If you are short on time, the free block of three and a walk take an hour and give you the movement in outline.
For how the Gaudí sites themselves rank and which deserve your limited days, our full Gaudí guide covers the order. And the one everybody books first, for good reason, is covered in our complete Sagrada Familia guide, which is also the building where the movement’s ambitions are at their largest.
The short version
Gaudí was one of several, and his contemporaries built things that are as good and far emptier. Prioritise the concert hall, ideally by booking a daytime recital rather than a tour, and the former hospital complex near the basilica, which surprises almost everybody. Look at the block of three competing houses from the pavement for nothing. And give an hour to walking the district looking up at doorways, which is the largest and least visited part of the movement.
The Palau de la Música Catalana is the building that convinces most people this movement was never only about Gaudí, a working concert hall lined in stained glass and mosaic. The Palau de la Música Catalana covers what a guided tour shows you and what an evening concert adds.
