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From Casa Vicens, it’s a five-minute walk east along c/Santa Agata, c/de la
Providencia and then south into pretty
Plaça de la Virreina
, backed by its
much-restored parish church of Sant Joan. This is one of Gràcia’s favourite
squares, with the
Virreina Bar
and others providing drinks and a place to rest and
admire the handsome houses, most notably
Casa Rubinat
(1909), c/de l’Or 44,
the last major work of Francesc Berenguer. Children and dogs, meanwhile,
scamper around the small drinking fountain. In the streets around here, between
carrers Torrijos and Verdi, are most of the neighbourhood’s boutiques, galleries,
cinemas and cafés, with c/Verdi in particular always worth a stroll.
Another short walk to the southwest,
Plaça del Sol
is the beating heart of
much of the district’s nightlife, though it’s not quite so appealing during the day.
It was redesigned rather soullessly in the 1980s, losing much of its attraction for
older locals at least. Far more in keeping with Gràcia’s overall tenor is
Plaça Rius
i Taulet
, just to the south acrossTravessera de Gràcia.The thirty-metre-high clock
tower was a rallying point for nineteenth-century radicals – whose twenty-first-
century counterparts prefer to meet for brunch at the popular café
terrassas
.
At Plaça Rius i Taulet you’re close to the main c/Gran de Gràcia.Walk south,
and where the street becomes Passeig de Gràcia stands the
Casa Fuster
, on the
left at no. 132 (
o
Diagonal). Designed by Lluís Domènech i Montaner in 1908
(and now a luxury hotel,
W
www.hotelcasafuster.com) it sports many of
Domènech’s most characteristic design features: a multi-columned building
with chunky floral capitals, and – designed to fit the awkward corner it’s built
on – one concave and one convex tower.
Parc Güell
From 1900 to 1914 Antoni Gaudí worked for Eusebi Güell (patron of
Gaudí’s Palau Güell, off the Ramblas) on the
Parc Güell
(daily: May–Aug
10am–9pm; April & Sept 10am–8pm; March & Oct 10am–7pm; Nov–Feb
10am–6pm; free), on the outskirts of Gràcia.This was Gaudí’s most ambitious
project after the Sagrada Família – on which he was engaged at the same
time, commissioned as a private housing estate of sixty dwellings and
furnished with paths, recreational areas and decorative monuments. It was
conceived as a “Garden City” of the type popular at the time in England –
indeed, Gaudí’s original plans used the English spelling “Park Güell”. In the
end, only two houses were actually built, and the park was officially opened
to the public instead in 1922.
Laid out on a hill, which provides fabulous views back across the city, the park
is an almost hallucinatory expression of the imagination. Pavilions of contorted
stone, giant decorative lizards, meandering rustic viaducts, a vast Hall of
Columns (intended to be the estate’s market), carved stone trees – all combine
in one manic swirl of ideas and excesses, reminiscent of an amusement park.The
Hall of Columns, for example, was described by the art critic Sacheverell Sitwell
(in
Spain
) as “at once a fun fair, a petrified forest, and the great temple of Amun
at Karnak, itself drunk, and reeling in an eccentric earthquake”. Perhaps the
most famous element – certainly the most widely photographed – is the long,
meandering
ceramic bench
that snakes along the edge of the terrace above
the columned hall. It’s entirely decorated with a brightly coloured broken tile-
and-glass mosaic (a method known as
trencadís
) that forms a dizzying sequence
of abstract motifs, symbols, words and pictures. The ceramic mosaics and
THE NORTHERN SUBURBS
|
Parc Güell