For the third and final installment of my smash hit series on moderniste architecture in my neighborhood (thanks for the great write-up, New Yorker!), I've decided to skip over the rest of the small potatoes apartment buildings on my street and go straight for what is known in Catalan as "the big kahuna": Park Güell.
The park—designed by the one, the only, Antoni Gaudí—isn't so much an integral part of my neighborhood as it is a giant tourist magnet that draws crowds of foreigners through the neighborhood's streets and up the partially escalatored Baixada de la Glòria, the less popular but no less spectacular back entrance to the park. Nevertheless, the park looms over the neighborhood like a brutal mass of tourist madness and tourists' euros which get happily dispersed between the park and the metro stop. The only part of the park itself visible from my street is the Turó de les Tres Creus, an outcropping at the park's highest point which Gaudí topped with three stone crosses.
Due to the unceasing masses of photo-minded visitors, it's a pretty awful park in the sense that it is hardly a sanctuary from the surrounding city—if anything, it's more crowded and hectic. To be fair, when it was built at the beginning of the 20th century, it was intended to be not a park but a ritzy suburban neighborhood; its creator (the eponymous Sr. Güell) would shudder at the rabble now thronging his once-peaceful walks.
Love it or hate it, it's one of the defining locales of my Barcelona barri, and one that has helped to define our conception of Gaudí and his modernisme.
