Palau Güell stands a few steps from the Rambla, on Carrer Nou de la Rambla, a street so narrow that you can never take in the whole façade. It is the town house that Eusebi Güell, the industrialist who would later commission Park Güell as well, had built by Antoni Gaudí between 1886 and 1890: stables under the street, a hall three storeys high beneath a pierced dome, twenty chimneys on the roof.
Today it belongs to the Diputació de Barcelona, the provincial council, which opens it to the public with an audio guide you listen to on your phone and which, for now, because of a technical problem, sells tickets only online.
Why does a private house have two gateways wide enough to drive a carriage through?
A town house for Eusebi Güell
Güell and Gaudí had met in 1878. Güell already had a house on the Rambla, inherited from his father, and in the 1880s he bought two buildings on the street next to it, then called Carrer del Conde del Asalto, to build a new one connected to the old. Planning permission was requested in July 1886.
The project ran straight into trouble with the City Council. The building regulations required the galleries on façades to be made of iron and glass, and Gaudí’s was stone. The municipal architect advised against it, but the committee rejected his report and the permit came through at the end of July. The stone is limestone from the Garraf, the area south of Barcelona where Güell had an estate.
The palace was inaugurated in 1888, the year of Barcelona’s Universal Exhibition, and the date is written on the façade. The decoration went on until 1890.
Two gateways for carriages, and the phoenix
The answer lies in what they were for: guests arrived by carriage. The two gateways are parabolic arches, wide enough for a carriage and horses to pass. In the wrought-iron grilles at the top, among the twisting lines, you can read the initials E and G, for Eusebi Güell.
Between the two gateways, look at the coat of arms: the stripes are those of the Catalan flag, and on top there is a phoenix, the bird that rises from its own ashes. It was the emblem of the magazine La Renaixensa, which Güell supported, and it puts on the façade the idea of a Catalonia being reborn.
The stables under the street
Where did the horses go, once the guests had been set down at the entrance?
Underground. The palace basement was the stable, and the horses reached it by a ramp designed by Gaudí, while the guests climbed the main staircase to the reception floors.
It is the most surprising room of the visit, precisely because it was a service space. The brick pillars are cylinders that flare into cones at the top and open out into the vaults, like great mushrooms. On the upper floors, by contrast, the pillars are stone.
The hall three storeys high
From the ground floor the staircase leads to the mezzanine, where Güell had his study and the archive, and then to the main floor. Here everything turns around a central hall of about eighty square metres, three storeys and 17.5 metres high, onto which the reception rooms, the chapel and the dining room open.
Where does the light come from, in a room enclosed on every side by other rooms?
From above. The hall is covered by a dome with a parabolic profile inside, clad in reddish plates and pierced by many small oculi arranged in circles around a central opening. Look up: by day those holes light up and the dome looks like a starry sky.
On either side of the hall were the chapel and an organ. The original organ was lost during the Civil War; the one you see today was built by Albert Blancafort and finished in 2012, with 1,386 pipes.
The part of the main floor that looks onto the inner courtyard of the block has a façade quite unlike the one on the street: a gallery closed by wooden shutters, with yellow ceramic brackets and a chequerboard of blue tiles, and above it a sunscreen of wood and iron.
The roof of twenty chimneys
The last staircase takes you onto the roof terrace, and here the palace changes character. There are twenty chimneys, fourteen on the main building and six on the annex, and Gaudí does not hide them: he turns them into sculptures, cones and pyramids clad in broken ceramics, the trencadís, in glass and in marble. Six are bare brick: they are the service chimneys, and that is how you recognise them.
In the middle rises the lantern that covers the dome of the hall, a cone sixteen metres high with windows that bring light inside.
The roof was not a place for the family: it was mostly the servants who came up, to hang out the washing. Today it is where you see where the chimneys of Casa Batlló and La Pedrera, which Gaudí would build almost twenty years later, come from.
From the Güell family to the Diputació
Güell lived in the palace until he moved to Park Güell, into the estate’s manor house, where he died in 1918. The house passed to his widow and then to his daughters; during the Civil War it was used as a police station.
In 1945 his youngest daughter, Mercè Güell i López, gave it to the Diputació de Barcelona on one condition: that it be preserved and used for cultural purposes. From 1954 to 1996 it housed the theatre museum. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984, together with Gaudí’s other works, including Park Güell, and after a long restoration it fully reopened in 2011.
Practical information
Details checked on 28 October 2026 on the official website, palauguell.cat. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
If you want to see where Gaudí went on working for Güell, Park Güell is the estate the two of them planned together on the hill. Gaudí’s first house, from a few years earlier, is Casa Vicens, and the building site that kept him busy for the rest of his life is the Sagrada Família.
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons: the façade, by Canaan, CC BY-SA 4.0; the gateways and the coat of arms, by Xavier Badia Castellà, CC BY-SA 3.0; the stables and the rear gallery, by Fred Romero, CC BY 2.0; the dome over the hall, by Canaan, CC BY-SA 4.0; the lantern and the chimneys, by FrDr, CC BY-SA 4.0.
