Park Güell was not born as a park. Eusebi Güell wanted it to be a residential estate for wealthy families, with sixty villas, carriage roads and a covered market, and he gave it an English name because he had British residential parks in mind. Two villas were built, and neither of them is by Gaudí.
What you see today are the shared spaces of a neighbourhood that never existed: the entrance stairway, the market, the square, the roads on their viaducts. That is why the park looks like a stage set with no play on it, and it is also the most useful way to look at it.
The ticket comes with precise rules: it is issued in your name, it is best bought online in advance and it is valid for a time slot, and you have half an hour from the start of the slot to get in. The name must match your ID, which you may be asked to show at the entrance.
Why does the dragon on the stairway, the one everyone photographs, have its mouth open?
An estate for sixty families, and two moved in
In 1900 Güell commissioned Antoni Gaudí to lay out a housing development on the hill the people of Barcelona called Muntanya Pelada, the bald mountain. The plan provided for about sixty triangular plots, and the building rules were strict: only a sixth of each plot could be built on, and the height and position of the houses were fixed so that none would take the sea view or the sun from its neighbours.
Work began in October 1900 and moved fast. By January 1903 the two entrance pavilions, the stairway, the boundary wall, the viaducts and part of the large terrace were already finished. The first plot was sold in 1902 to a friend of Güell’s, the lawyer Martí Trias i Domènech, who had his house built by the architect Juli Batllevell. The house, Casa Trias, still belongs to the lawyer’s descendants.
What was wrong with a neighbourhood that had a view of the sea?
The land was far from the city and poorly served by transport, the purchase contracts followed an old form of emphyteusis, a long-term lease, and the exclusive character of the whole venture did the rest. In 1914 work stopped with two houses built out of sixty. The second was a show house, designed by Francesc Berenguer to show buyers what the estate would look like: nobody bought it until Gaudí’s father did in 1906, and the architect went to live there.
Güell died in 1918 at Casa Larrard, the old manor house of the estate, which he had turned into his residence. On 26 May 1922 the City Council voted to buy the land, and in 1926 the estate that never was opened as a municipal park. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984. In the city Güell had already had Gaudí build him a family house, Palau Güell, a stone’s throw from the Rambla.
The dragon stairway, and why the dragon has its mouth open
From the main entrance, on Carrer d’Olot, a double stairway climbs in three flights. Halfway up you find the coat of arms of Catalonia; higher up is the dragon, or salamander, covered in trencadís, the mosaic of broken ceramic pieces Gaudí used to clad curved surfaces.
The open mouth has a hydraulic reason. Above the stairway is the hypostyle hall, and above the hall is the square: rainwater that soaks through the square is collected by a pipe that runs inside the columns and ends in an underground cistern. When the cistern is full, the overflow comes out at a single point, and that point is the dragon’s mouth. The statue everyone photographs is the overflow of a water tank.
It is how Gaudí worked throughout the park: every ornament also has a job. At the top of the last flight, sheltered under the hall, there is a bench shaped like a Greek theatre, and that is where the stairway ends.
The hypostyle hall: a market with 86 columns
What is a Doric colonnade doing in a residential estate?
It was the estate’s covered market, where the residents of the sixty villas would have done their shopping. There are 86 columns, fluted and inspired by the Doric order, and the outer ones lean inwards, against every rule of classical composition, because they have to take the thrust of the square above.
The ceiling is made of small brick domes clad in white ceramic fragments, and where some columns are missing, spaces open up that recall the three aisles of a church. Look up: between the little domes there are coloured medallions, shaped like suns or spirals. They were made by Josep Maria Jujol, Gaudí’s assistant, from broken ceramics and scrap materials.
The square is the roof of the market
Leave the hall, climb up, and you are standing on its roof. The large terrace at the centre of the park was called the Greek Theatre in the plans, because it was meant to host open-air performances watched from the terraces around it; today its official name is Plaça de la Natura.
It is the only place in the park that Gaudí did not fit to the lie of the land: the square is artificial, partly cut into the rock and partly resting on the columns of the market. On the stairway side it is closed by the undulating bench covered in mosaic, also by Jujol, which works as a parapet and a seat at once. On the hillside it is closed by a retaining wall with large palm-shaped capitals.
If you are looking for the cover photograph, it was taken from here: the bench in the foreground, lower down the chequered tower of one of the entrance pavilions, and behind it the city all the way to the sea.
The entrance pavilions, and a gate that came from another house
The two pavilions on either side of the main entrance look as if they came out of a fairy tale, and they had very practical uses. The one on the left welcomed visitors, with a waiting room and a telephone booth; the one on the right was the porter’s lodge, the Casa del Guarda, and today it houses a branch of the Barcelona History Museum. Both roofs are covered in trencadís.
Look at the gate between the pavilions, the one with the wrought-iron palm leaves. It was not designed for the park: it comes from Casa Vicens, Gaudí’s first house, now in Barcelona’s Gràcia neighbourhood. When that garden was sold and divided up, the railings were taken down and some pieces ended up here. The story of the house, and of the palm Gaudí drew the gate from, is in Casa Vicens, Gaudí’s first house.
Viaducts, the Three Crosses and the house where Gaudí lived
To bring carriages from the entrance to the upper part of the hill, Gaudí designed three viaducts five metres wide, carried on slanting columns and vaults built from the rough stone of the site itself. You walk beneath the viaducts sheltered from the rain, the carriages ran on top, and each viaduct had a cistern to collect water. Altogether the estate’s road network is three kilometres long.
The highest point, at 182.30 metres, was where the estate’s chapel was supposed to stand. When the project failed, three stone crosses were put there instead, the Calvary. From up there you can see the whole city.
A warning, if you plan to climb it: at the end of October 2026 the paths between the Coll del Portell entrance and the Forat del Vent stairway, and between Casa Trias and the upper viaduct, are closed for works expected to last eighteen months. The park’s website keeps the state of the works up to date on a dedicated page.
The Casa Museu Gaudí, the show house where the architect lived with his father and his niece, is inside the park but has a separate ticket: the park ticket does not include it.
Practical information
Details checked on 27 October 2026 on the official website, parkguell.barcelona. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
If you also want to see the Sagrada Família the same day, you travel between the two by metro, and Gaudí’s story begins further down, in the same district of Gràcia, at Casa Vicens. For the houses Gaudí built in the city in the same years as the park, the next step is Casa Batlló and La Pedrera, on the same avenue.
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons: the bench on the square with the pavilion tower, by Daniel Kraft, CC BY-SA 3.0; the columns of the hypostyle hall, by Harvey Barrison, CC BY-SA 2.0; the ceiling medallion, by Delialendeczki, CC BY-SA 3.0; the dragon, by Isiwal, CC BY-SA 3.0; the square above the hypostyle hall, by Florio, CC BY-SA 3.0 ES; the entrance pavilions, by Jean-Christophe Benoist, CC BY 3.0; the palm-leaf gate, by nikko23_99, CC BY-SA 3.0.
