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In-Depth Information
on a large working estate well away from the filth and unruly mobs of downtown Barcelona.
The summer house itself was later given to the royal family (and rebuilt as the Palau Reial),
but the brick-and-tile stables and outbuildings - known as the
Pavellons Güell
- survive as
Gaudí created them. They are frothy, whimsical affairs showing more than a Moorish touch
to them, with minarets that display Gaudí's first experimentation with
trencadís
(broken tile
mosaics), a technique he then used continually on his more famous projects.
However,it'sthe
gateway
that'sthemostfamouselement.Anextraordinarywingeddragon
madeoftwistedironsnarlsatthepassers-by,itsrazor-toothedjawsspreadwideinafearsome
roar: backing up to pose for a photograph suddenly doesn't seem like such a good idea. Dur-
ing the week you can't go any further than the gate, but guided visits show you the grounds
and Gaudí's innovative stables, now used as a library by the university's historical architec-
ture department.
HERE BE DRAGONS
The slavering beast on Gaudí's dragon gate at the Pavellons Güell is not the vanquished
dragon of Sant Jordi (St George), the Catalan patron saint, but the one that appears in the
Labours of Hercules
myth, a familiar Catalan theme in the nineteenth century. Gaudí's
design was based on a work by the Catalan renaissance poet
Jacint Verdaguer
, a friend
of the Güell family, who had reworked the myth in his epic poem,
ĽAtlàntida
- thus, the
dragon guarding golden apples in the Gardens of Hesperides is here protecting instead
an orange tree (considered a more Catalan fruit). Gaudí's gate indeed can be read as an
homage to Verdaguer, with its stencilled roses representing those traditionally given to the
winner of the Catalan poetry competition, the Jocs Floral, which the poet won in 1877.
Monestir de Pedralbes
Bxda del Monestir 9 • April-Sept Tues-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat until 7pm, Sun until 8pm, Oct-March Tues-Fri
10am-2pm,Sat&Sun10am-5pm,hols10am-2pm•€7,includesentrytootherMuseud'HistòriadeBarcelona
sites, free Sun after 3pm • 932 563 434,
www.museuhistoria.bcn.cat
• Palau Reial and 20min walk, or
FGC Reina Elisenda (frequent trains from Pl. de Catalunya) and 10min walk, or bus #64 from Pl. Universitat
Founded in 1326 for the nuns of the Order of St Clare, the Gothic
Monestir de Pedralbes
is, in effect, an entire monastic village preserved on the outskirts of the city, within medieval
walls that completely shut out the noise and clamour of the twenty-first century. It took me-
dieval craftsmen a little over a year to prepare Pedralbes (from the Latin
petrasalbas
, “white
stones”) for its first community of nuns. The speed of the initial construction and the subse-
quent uninterrupted habitation by the order helps explain the extreme architectural harmony.
Aftersixhundredyearsofisolation,themonasterywassequesteredbytheGeneralitatduring
the Civil War and it later opened as a
museum
in 1983-a new adjacent convent was built as
