The things people walk past, standing right in front of them

What follows is a list of small things, most of them free to look at from a pavement, with what the buildings themselves say about each. No ranking. The order is the order you would meet them.

Two different animals under the Sagrada Família

On the Nativity façade, on carrer de la Marina, two columns come down to the ground and each one lands on an animal. They are not the same animal.

The basilica’s own booklet: the column on the left rests on a sea turtle, “closest to the sea”, and bears the name Joseph; the other rests on a land tortoise, “as it is closest to the mountain”, and bears the name of Mary.

Sea and mountain is how this city gives directions — not north and south, but mar and muntanya. A building that encodes its own orientation in its foundations, in the local vocabulary, at ankle height.

The chameleons are running away

There is one at each outer edge of the same façade. What the basilica says they are doing is specific: the turtles and “the chameleons on either side of the façade are fleeing down, away from evil”.

You will be told they represent change, because a chameleon changes colour. That reading does not appear anywhere in the basilica’s own material.

The doves in the cypress, uncounted

At the top there is a cypress tree with white doves in it. The booklet says they are “symbols of the men and women who have been saved”, sheltering in the tree, with the Holy Trinity above them.

You will read a number. There is no number: the basilica has never published one, and we have looked. Anybody who gives you a figure has got it from somebody who also got it from somebody.

The one tower he lived to see

The four bell towers on the Nativity side are for the apostles Barnabas, Simon, Jude Thaddeus and Matthias. The one for Barnabas was finished in 1925, and it is the only tower of the whole building Gaudí ever saw completed. He died the next year. The other three went up in 1930.

Everything else on that skyline is posthumous.

The faces are casts of actual faces

This one sounds like a tour-guide story and is in the basilica’s own booklet: “the sculptures were moulded from real human and animal models”. Plaster negatives were taken from living people and animals, tried out on the façade at size, and then cut in stone if Gaudí liked the effect.

The grisly versions of that story — a chloroformed donkey, a dead newborn — circulate widely and are not in any official source. The method is documented. The anecdotes are not.

The square that adds up to 33

Round on carrer de Sardenya, in the Passion façade, beside the sculpture of the Judas kiss, there is a four-by-four grid of numbers.

Every line adds up to 33, the age at which Jesus is traditionally said to have died. To get there, Subirachs took the magic square from Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I and broke it: he dropped the 12 and the 16 and repeated the 14 and the 10. So it is not a magic square in the mathematical sense — it does not use each number once and its constant is 33 rather than 34.

Two more things the basilica points out. The repeated numbers, read as positions in the Roman alphabet, give the initials INRI. And there are 310 different combinations of its cells that reach 33, not just the rows and columns.

Gaudí’s face is on the Passion façade

Among the figures on that same façade, the Evangelist watching Jesus console the women of Jerusalem was given Gaudí’s own face by Subirachs. And the Roman soldiers’ helmets are modelled on the chimneys of La Pedrera.

Which is a sculptor, working from 1986, arguing back at the architect in the architect’s own vocabulary, on a building whose plans had been burnt half a century earlier.

Gaudí asked for that façade to frighten people

The severity is not a modern imposition. Gaudí described this façade in a drawing published in 1917, and his words are quoted by the basilica from Isidre Puig i Boada’s El pensament de Gaudí:

Somebody may find this façade too extravagant; but I would like it to inspire fear, and to achieve that I will not spare the chiaroscuro, the protruding and hollowed elements, everything that produces a gloomier effect. What is more, I am willing to sacrifice the building itself, to break arches, to cut columns, in order to give an idea of how bloody the Sacrifice is.

If you dislike it, you are having the intended reaction.

The balconies on Passeig de Gràcia are one piece each

Casa Batlló’s own architectural pages describe the balcony railings as “shaped like masks”, made of cast iron “in a single piece and fixed with two anchor points”. Below them the columns are given bone-like shapes, which is where the building’s other nickname comes from.

The Saint George reading — scaled roof as dragon, cross as the hilt of a sword — is on the same pages, described as a popular interpretation, with the note that “Gaudí never explained his work”. There is a rival reading in which the whole façade is Carnival: harlequin’s hat, ball masks, confetti. Both are guesses, and the house says so.

The stone at La Pedrera is not holding anything up

Two hundred metres up the street, the wave of stone across the front of La Pedrera is carrying nothing. Its own description is blunt: the façade “is not structural: it is a non-load bearing wall called a curtain wall”, more than 6,000 stone blocks hung on the structure behind with metal fixings.

That is the whole trick, and it explains the shape. A wall that carries no load is free to do anything.

The 29 chimneys on the roof, four metres tall, are the flues of a coal-fired central heating system that no longer exists. And under that roof, out of sight from the pavement, sit 270 brick arches of the shape Gaudí called catenary — the curve a hanging chain makes, inverted, which stands on its own and needs no buttress. That one you have to buy a ticket for.

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None of the above is hidden. All of it is at eye level or just above it, on streets you can stand on for nothing. Most of it goes unnoticed because forty minutes with a phone camera is not the same activity as looking.

The man who put most of it there died eleven months after his one finished tower went up, on a street a few minutes from the Nativity façade: 7 June 1926.

The order to walk them in is in every Gaudí building in Barcelona, and the street-by-street lap of the basilica is in how to look at the Sagrada Família from the street. Which of the stories attached to these buildings survive checking is in things you will be told about Gaudí that are not true.

And if you would rather have somebody point at them, our Gaudí walk is ninety minutes of exactly this, done by an actor playing the man who put the turtles there.

Two of the things on this page have since earned their own. The broken-ceramic surfaces, and what the fragments were before somebody broke them — one group of La Pedrera’s chimneys is clad in champagne bottles — are in trencadís. And the reason the shapes are the shapes, from the hanging string model to the wall that carries nothing, is how Gaudí’s buildings stand up.