Asked to design a hospital for Barcelona, Lluís Domènech i Montaner turned down the idea of one large closed building and drew a small city instead: separate pavilions, one for each medical specialty, scattered through a garden and linked underground by tunnels, so that patients and nurses would not have to go outdoors.
That city treated patients until the autumn of 2009, when the hospital moved into a new building put up to the north of the complex. Today the restored modernista pavilions are open to visitors, and since 1997 they have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site together with the Palau de la Música Catalana, the other great work by the same architect.
One detail saves you money: the self-guided visit costs a euro less if you go in after 14:00.
Who paid for a hospital like this, and why are his initials on the towers?
Five centuries of hospital before this one
The hospital of Sant Pau did not begin here. At the start of the fifteenth century Barcelona had six small hospitals, founded by religious orders and private benefactors and kept going almost entirely by alms; in 1401 the Council of One Hundred and the cathedral chapter merged them into one, the Hospital de la Santa Creu, the hospital of the Holy Cross. The first stone was laid on 13 February 1401, in the presence of King Martin the Humane, and the Gothic building, in the Raval district, was finished in 1450.
For five centuries it was the city’s hospital, and more besides: until the end of the nineteenth century it also took in and educated orphans, and its work gave rise to the Royal College of Surgery, the forerunner of the faculty of medicine. To support itself it had obtained some curious privileges, among them, granted by Philip II in 1587, the monopoly on theatre performances in the city.
By the end of the nineteenth century the Gothic building was no longer enough for a city growing into the Eixample, or for a medicine that was changing.
The banker in Paris and the initials on the tower
The answer came from a will. In 1896 Pau Gil i Serra, a Catalan banker, died in Paris and left his fortune to build a new hospital in Barcelona, on two conditions: that it use the most advanced technical, architectural and medical innovations, and that it be dedicated to Saint Paul, in Catalan Sant Pau. An agreement between the Santa Creu and the executors of the will allowed it to be built on land belonging to the Santa Creu, north of the Eixample.
You find the benefactor’s name everywhere, if you know where to look. The initials P and G, for Pau and Gil, are repeated in the decoration of the pavilions, small on the cornices and large on the towers, like the one in the photograph.
A garden city instead of a palace
Domènech studied the most modern hospitals in Europe and chose the pavilion model, based on the principles of the hygienist movement: natural light, air, gardens around the patients. He designed a complex of 48 buildings; 27 were built, and only 16 to his original modernista design.
Why do the avenues of Sant Pau run diagonally to the streets of the Eixample?
The answer lies in the plan. Domènech organised the complex on two diagonal axes, one north-south and the other east-west, which meet and form a cross: it is the emblem of the old Santa Creu, which in this way becomes part of the very shape of the new hospital. The layout that breaks with the Eixample grid follows from that choice.
Construction of the first ten buildings began in 1902, and each was dedicated to a medical specialty. Domènech died in 1923 and the work was completed by his son, Pere Domènech i Roura. King Alfonso XIII officially opened the hospital on 16 January 1930.
The tunnels under the gardens
How did you move a patient from one pavilion to another, in a hospital made of separate buildings?
Under the gardens runs a kilometre of underground tunnels linking the pavilions. They were used to move staff and patients between pavilions without going outdoors, and the services ran through them too, so they could be maintained without entering the wards.
The visit begins down below: you go into the hypostyle hall, which housed the emergency department, and the tunnels take you to the Sant Salvador pavilion, the first to open, in 1916, where the story of the hospital and of Domènech is told. Then you come back up into the gardens.
The pavilions, and the patron saints of medicine
The pavilions are dedicated to saints and to the Virgin, and the operating house is dedicated to the patron saints of doctors, Saints Cosmas and Damian. Their mosaic images decorate the side windows, between red brick and stone frames.
Inside the pavilions the decoration is not merely ornament: Domènech wanted ceramics everywhere for their hygienic function as well. The operating house and the Sant Rafael pavilion recreate what life in the hospital was like in the 1920s and what kind of medicine was practised there: at Sant Rafael you find a day room for patients, with high windows on three sides and rocking chairs.
The Administration pavilion, and the new Baroque gallery
The pavilion at the entrance, with the clock tower, is the Administration pavilion, and the route ends here. It is the most richly decorated in the complex, and since 15 October 2026 it has one more reason to go upstairs: on the second floor a Baroque gallery has opened, two rooms with twelve paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most of which come from the old Santa Creu and its convalescent home. The first room recreates the administrators’ office as it was in the mid-twentieth century; in the second there are, among others, four canvases by Antoni Viladomat, the most representative painter of the Catalan Baroque.
It is the part of the visit that shows the works of the earlier, Gothic hospital, and brings into the route the centuries before Domènech’s architecture.
Practical information
Details checked on 27 October 2026 on the official website, santpaubarcelona.org. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
Sant Pau can also be bought together with other sites: the official website sells a ticket with La Pedrera and the “Domènech i Montaner” pass, with the Palau de la Música Catalana and the Cafè Vienès in Casa Fuster, which on Tiqets you will find as the Domènech i Montaner pass. If you are starting from the Sagrada Família, the avenue is the finest way to get here; if instead you want to see the other half of Domènech’s work, it is the Palau de la Música Catalana.
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons: the Administration pavilion in the evening, by C messier, CC BY-SA 4.0; the dome and the tower with the P, by Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0; the avenue of pavilions, the underground tunnel and the mosaic of Saint Cosmas, by Enfo, CC BY-SA 3.0; the day room in Sant Rafael, by Susi4, CC BY-SA 2.5 ES.
