The façade of La Pedrera looks like the face of a quarry, and that is where the nickname comes from: pedrera is Catalan for a stone quarry. Yet that stone holds nothing up. It is a wall hung from the building’s structure with metal fixings, and behind it there are no load-bearing walls: the house stands on pillars, twenty years before modern architecture made that the norm.
Casa Milà is the last civil work of Antoni Gaudí, built between 1906 and 1912 for Pere Milà and Rosario Segimon, and it is still an apartment building with flats for rent. The visit takes in the two courtyards, a flat furnished as it was in 1911, the attic and the roof.
It is worth knowing straight away that the basic ticket, La Pedrera Essential, is valid from 9:00 to 17:30, with last entry at 17:15: later in the day you go in with other tickets, which have their own prices.
How did you get up to your flat in a building with no main staircase?
An illegal house, four thousand cubic metres too big
The plans were submitted to the City Council on 2 February 1906, and work began the same day. The building site immediately caught the attention of the magazines, and of the officials too: the attic and the roof exceeded the volume allowed by the regulations by 4,000 cubic metres, and there was a risk they would have to be demolished.
What saved it was its own character. On 28 December 1909 the Eixample commission ruled that the house was monumental in nature and therefore did not have to follow the building ordinances to the letter; the rest was settled by a compensation payment estimated at 100,000 pesetas. On 31 October 1912 Gaudí certified that the house was finished and ready to let.
The first tenants were friends and acquaintances of the Milàs: a car manufacturer, the Argentine consul, a doctor. One of them, the textile industrialist Antoni Feliu, was among the first to keep a car in the building, a Rolls-Royce, and Gaudí had to alter the garage entrance to let it through.
Rosario Segimon, on the other hand, never liked the decoration Gaudí had designed for her flat. After the architect’s death she had 532.50 square metres of false ceilings in her flat demolished, removed parquet floors and shutters, and replaced twenty doors and windows.
A façade that holds nothing up
If the stone does not carry the weight, what does?
The façade is a curtain wall: more than 6,000 blocks of stone hooked onto the structure with metal fixings. The stone comes in three kinds: Garraf limestone for the lower parts, stone from Vilafranca del Penedès for the large blocks and a few cornices of Ulldecona limestone.
The weight is carried by pillars of stone and brick, and without load-bearing walls Gaudí could design each floor as he pleased. Look at the 32 balconies: the railings are made of salvaged iron, bars and chains, and the balconies are so deep that they are small terraces. Gaudí put the drains below floor level, so that from the flat you could see the whole street.
No main staircase: you went up by lift
In the rental buildings of the Eixample, the main staircase was the building’s calling card. La Pedrera has none: the tenants went up by lift or by the service stairs, and the lifts are part of the design of a modern house fitted with services.
The same spirit lies behind the garage, the first in a residential building: it is in the basement and you reach it by spiral ramps wide enough for horses and carriages, and later for cars, which had been spreading since 1900.
The two blocks of flats have separate entrances and look onto two large courtyards, which bring light and air to every room. One of them, the one on the Passeig de Gràcia side, is cylindrical, and its floor rests on a metal structure that looks like a bicycle wheel.
The flat and the rippling ceilings
The visit goes into a flat furnished as in 1911, and the first thing to look at is the ceilings. They are not flat: they follow the waves of the building, with circles, ellipses, spirals and sometimes phrases. Gaudí drew them on the floor plan and the plasterer reproduced them on the ceiling, on a backing of woven reeds nailed to boards fixed to the beams.
Even the front doors of the flats are designed for use: they have large peepholes with iron slats, which let you talk to whoever is on the landing without opening, and a slot at the side for the post.
The attic of 270 arches
To keep weight off the building, Gaudí built the attic on 270 brick arches that he called balanced, in other words catenary arches: light, easy to build, they stand up on their own and need no buttresses. The attic housed the shared laundry rooms, the drying areas, the storerooms and the lift machinery, and it also acted as an air chamber: in summer the windows were opened to let air through, in winter they were closed to keep the heat in.
In 1953 the architect Barba Corsini made fourteen flats out of it. Today the attic houses a permanent exhibition on Gaudí.
The roof: chimneys, champagne glass and the Sagrada Família in an arch
What are the figures on the roof, really?
On the roof every shape has a job. The six largest shapes are the stairway exits, seven metres high, each with a spiral staircase inside that climbs from the attic. Then there are 29 chimneys, four metres high, two standing alone and the others grouped in twos, fives or sevens, and two ventilation towers that renewed the air in the attic.
Look for the only group of chimneys clad in trencadís: the fragments come from green champagne bottles.
And then there is the arch. Beside two of the stairways Gaudí built small arches covered in white fragments, which help hold the structure together; one of them frames the Sagrada Família, and according to the foundation that runs the house Gaudí calculated its height so that the finished church would fit inside it.
Since 2026 the Sagrada Família has had its tallest tower, and the story of that building site is in The Sagrada Família, a machine for light.
From government offices to cultural centre
During the Civil War the house was requisitioned and held offices of the Republican government. In 1946 Rosario Segimon sold it to a property company, while she went on living on the main floor, and in the decades that followed maintenance was neglected: in 1971 a large piece of stone fell from the first floor. In December 1986 Caixa Catalunya bought it, restored it after years of neglect and opened it to the public as a cultural centre in June 1996. Since then more than 29 million people have visited it, and it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984, together with Park Güell and Palau Güell.
Practical information
Details checked on 27 October 2026 on the official website, lapedrera.com. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
La Pedrera and the Sant Pau Art Nouveau Site can be bought together: the combined ticket is sold both on La Pedrera’s website and on Sant Pau’s, and on Tiqets there is the Casa Milà and Sant Pau combined ticket. The story of Domènech i Montaner’s hospital complex is in Sant Pau, the hospital that is a city. Further down the same avenue is Casa Batlló, which Gaudí finished the year he began this one.
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons: the façade in the evening, by C messier, CC BY-SA 4.0; the courtyard from the roof, by José Luiz, CC BY-SA 3.0; the relief ceiling, by Ad Meskens, CC BY-SA 4.0; the attic, by Mikani, CC BY-SA 4.0; the chimney, by Mikani, CC BY-SA 4.0; the arch with the Sagrada Família, by Tony Hisgett, CC BY 2.0.
