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Barcelona). Extraordinary columns branch towards the spreading stone leaves of
the roof, a favourite Gaudí motif inspired by the city’s plane trees – he envisaged
the temple interior as a forest from very early days.
Elevators
(open same hours as the church; €2) run up the towers of the Passion
and Nativity facades, from where you’ll be rewarded by partial views of the city
through an extraordinary jumble of latticed stonework, ceramic decoration, carved
buttresses and sculpture.Your entrance ticket also gives you access to the
crypt
,
where a
museum
(timing as for the church) traces the career of the architect and
the history of the church. Models, sketches and photographs help to make some
sense of the work going on around you, and you can see sculptors and model-
makers at work in the plaster workshop.The 45-minute
guided tours
run hourly
in season (May to Oct, in English at 11am, 1pm, 3pm & 5pm), mornings only the
rest of the year, and you can book a place on the next one when you turn up.
Hospital de la Santa Creu i de Sant Pau
While you’re in the neighbourhood, it would be a shame not to stroll from the
Sagrada Família to Lluís Domènech i Montaner’s innovative
Hospital de la
Santa Creu i de Sant Pau
(
o
Hospital de Sant Pau), possibly the one building
that can rival the church for size and invention.The hospital has its own metro
stop, but it’s far better to walk up the four-block-long Avinguda de Gaudí,
which gives terrific views back over the spires of the Sagrada Família.
Work started on the hospital in 1902, the brief being to replace the city’s
medieval hospital buildings in the Raval with a modern series of departments
and wards. Domènech i Montaner spent ten years working on the building and
left his trademarks all over it: thumbing his nose at Cerdà, the buildings are
aligned diagonally to the Eixample, surrounded by gardens; and everywhere,
whimsical pavilions, turrets and towers sport bright ceramic tiles and little
domes. Domènech retired in 1912, once funds had run out, and the building
wasn’t fully completed until 1930, seven years after his death, though the latter
stages were overseen by Domènech’s son Pere, ensuring a certain continuity of
style. Craftsmen adorned every inch with sculpture, mosaics, stained glass and
ironwork, while much of the actual business of running a hospital was hidden
away in underground corridors which connect the buildings together. It’s a
stunning, harmonious achievement – that it’s a hospital seems almost incidental,
which is doubtless the effect that the architect intended.
The
modernista
hospital buildings are deemed to have served their purpose;
behind them spreads the high-tech central block of the new hospital.The pavilions
have been turned over to educational and cultural use (a Museum of Medicine is
mooted), and include the
Centre del Modernisme
(daily 10am–2pm;
T
933 177
652,
W
www.rutadelmodernisme.com), where you can find out about and buy the
city’s Ruta del Modernisme sightseeing package.You can also sign up here for
informative
guided tours
of the complex (daily at 10.15am & 12.15pm in
English, plus others in Spanish/Catalan; €5), which can tell you more about the
six-hundred-year history of the hospital.
Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes and around
Barcelona’s major arterial routes all meet at the
Plaça de les Glòries
Catalanes
(
o
Glòries), named for and dedicated to the “Catalan glories”, from
architecture to literature.Although now stuck out at the eastern edge of the city
centre, Glòries was conceived by nineteenth-century designer Ildefons Cerdà as
the nucleus of his Eixample blueprint.This never materialized and for years it’s
THE EIXAMPLE
|
Sagrada Família and Glòries