City walk · Barcelona · Spain
Antoni Gaudí
1852–1926 · a real person
an old, stubborn, devout builder; plain speech, dry humour, obsessed with stone and money
Read what Antoni Gaudí says
My name is Antoni Gaudí, and I built in this city for fifty years. They call me a genius now. In my lifetime they called my work a quarry, and drew cartoons of it in the newspapers. Walk with me from the church that ate my life down into the old streets where I began, and I will tell you what each building cost, and who paid, and who complained. My client, the one upstairs, was never in a hurry. You and I have ninety minutes.
5.0 (1)114 min · 4.6 km · 8 stops · medium
You’re walking this one before anyone at Walk & Tell has. If something looks wrong, tap Report at any stop — we’ll fix it for everyone after you.
Partly shadedBest time to walk: Early morning or after five. Passeig de Gràcia bakes at midday, and the Boqueria is calmer before ten; the market is closed on Sundays.
The walk
A single line across Barcelona, from the unfinished basilica that swallowed Antoni Gaudí's last forty years down the grand boulevard of the rich, into the market, the cathedral and the medieval lanes. Gaudí himself tells it: the clients, the quarrels, the money, the stone. The walk ends among the Gothic palaces where a young Picasso was learning to laugh at him. It is the city as a working man saw it, not as a postcard.
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