Park Güell
You start high over the city, on the southern slope of the Carmel hill, in the park Antoni Gaudí built between 1900 and 1914 for the industrialist Eusebi Güell. Look at how walls, paths and structures bend and lean with the hillside instead of fighting it, and at the ornament that runs over them with a freedom that ignores every classical rule.
The surprising part is that this was never planned as a park. Güell and Gaudí conceived it as an exclusive housing estate: upscale homes with every technical comfort of the day, finished with real artistic care and set into the natural landscape. It opened as a public park in 1926, and that is how the city has used it ever since.
Park Güell belongs to Gaudí's naturalist period in the first decade of the twentieth century, when he refined his own style by borrowing from the organic shapes of nature and trying out new structural solutions rooted in geometry. Many ideas you will meet later in the Sagrada Família were tested here first, so this start gives you the key to much of the morning.
Entry requires a ticket; buy it from the official seller rather than a reseller. Give yourself about an hour, then walk 2350 m, around 33 minutes, to the Hospital de Sant Pau.
