The city's own Gaudí list has things on it that no tour goes to

Barcelona publishes its catalogue of protected architectural heritage as an open dataset. Anybody can download it. Filter the author field for Gaudí and you get twenty-nine records, which collapse to about nineteen distinct things once the duplicated polygons are merged.

Most of them you have heard of. Several you have not, and two of them are street furniture.

The one that won a prize

Casa Calvet, carrer de Casp, near Urquinaona. The municipal catalogue dates it 1898-1900, calls it modernista, and records its original use as something no other Gaudí building on the list has: “Residencial i magatzem” — residential and warehouse. A block of flats with a business underneath, which is what it still is, minus the warehouse.

And then the Sagrada Família’s own booklet on Gaudí’s works, listing it as a “transition work” in which he “started from the classical style of buildings in the Eixample district, but then began to incorporate his own solutions”, adds a line under the photograph:

Barcelona City Council Award, 1900.

That is the only award we have been able to attach to any Gaudí building, and it went to the one that looks least like him. Its front is flat, its composition is Baroque, and it is the building most often produced as evidence against the claim that he never drew a straight line.

You can see the whole façade from the opposite pavement, which happens to be wide — something that is not true at Casa Vicens, where the street will not let you stand far enough back.

The one with a dead king underneath it

Torre Bellesguard, at the foot of the Collserola hills. The catalogue files it under its original name, “Torre J. Figueras”, dates it 1900-02 and describes its style as modernisme with Gothicist references — then explains why, in a single clause: it was built on the spot where, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there still survived remains of the palace that Martin I had made for himself at the start of the fifteenth.

Martin I — Martí l’Humà — was the last monarch of the House of Barcelona. The house’s own pages date his arrival to 1408 and his death there to 1410, and say the medieval remains and stretches of wall can still be seen around the Gaudí building.

Two more things that are not on the plaque. The commission came in 1900 from Maria Sagués, widow of Jaume Figueras, who owned a food company; he had died before the work began, so it was hers. And the reason the catalogue’s dates stop at 1902 while the building feels later is that Domènec Sugrañes came back in 1917 and completed it, with the mosaic benches, the washstand in the vestibule and the tenants’ house.

Gaudí, according to Joan Rubió i Bellver, did not want help with this one. Rubió told the story on a train, years afterwards: Gaudí meant to design and direct the whole thing himself, and Rubió thought it was to spare the widow the extra cost. He assisted on the viaduct at the end, and that was all.

The one that is a parish church in Sant Andreu

This is the entry that stopped us.

PARRÒQUIA DE SANT PACIÀ. Church: Joan Torras Guardiola, architect; interior decoration: Antoni Gaudí i Cornet, architect. Church: 1876-81; interior decoration: 1879-81.

A working parish in Sant Andreu, at the far end of the city, with an interior the municipal catalogue attributes to Gaudí — from the years when he had just qualified and was taking small jobs. It carries the lowest of the three protection levels, it is on no itinerary we have seen, and it is a church people go to rather than a monument people visit, which is worth remembering if you decide to go.

We have not been inside it and we are not going to describe what is in there. We are telling you the record exists.

The two sets of street lamps, which are not the same set

Everyone knows about the Plaça Reial lampposts. The catalogue has them: FANALS, 1878, district 01.

The catalogue also has a second entry: FANALS, project 1889, placed 1890, district 01, at the lowest protection level, still recorded as being in use as street lamps. A different commission, eleven years later, in the old city, and not the ones in the square everybody photographs.

Two separate sets of Gaudí street lamps in Ciutat Vella, and the guidebooks carry one.

The garden furniture in Pedralbes

Out in district 04, in the grounds of the Palau de Pedralbes — the estate that used to be the Finca Güell — the catalogue lists three separate Gaudí entries beyond the famous dragon gate:

• Pavellons i porta nord of the Finca Güell, 1884-87, original use recorded as stables, coach houses, porter’s lodge. That is the one with the dragon on it.
• Portes sud i est of the old Finca Güell, 1884. The south and east gates. Nobody mentions these.
• Font d’Hèrcules, approximately 1884, use recorded as sculptural fountain.
• Umbracle, approximately 1884 — a shade house.

A Hercules fountain by Gaudí, in a public palace garden, at the top of the city. We have not verified for ourselves what state it is in or how you get to it, so treat this as a pointer to the record rather than as a recommendation with a route attached.

There is a small pleasure in it: Aleix Clapés, the painter who worked with Gaudí, put a fresco of Hercules in search of the Hesperides on a wall of Palau Güell around 1889-90. The client liked the myth.

The gateway with somebody else’s house behind it

Portal d’entrada de la Casa Miralles, 1901-02, on Passeig de Manuel Girona: the catalogue records its use as fence and entrance gate, which is exactly what survives. An undulating wall with a door in it, on a pavement full of people who have no idea whose it is.

The house it was the gate to is not Gaudí’s. Sugrañes built it in 1919, in the shape of a Valencian barraca.

The school you can only see from the street

Col·legi de les Teresianes, carrer de Ganduxer. First phase 1888, extensions 1889-94 in the catalogue; the basilica’s booklet says 1888-1889. Original use: religious and teaching. It is still a working school, so the run of parabolic arches along the façade is what you get, and it is the thing worth seeing anyway.

The entry we cannot explain, and are not going to tidy

One record in the dataset reads:

CASA ALEIX CLAPÉS. Author: Antoni Gaudí i Cornet, architect. Period: 1927-29. Style: eclecticism. District 06.

Gaudí died in 1926.

We do not know what to make of it. It could be a project of his built posthumously; it could be an error in an author field; it could be something about the Clapés family we have not found. We have not been able to resolve it against any other source, and inventing an explanation would be exactly the failure this whole site exists to avoid. So it stays here as it stands: a Gràcia house, in the city’s own catalogue, credited to a man who was three years dead when it went up.

While we are in the catalogue: the dates do not agree

This is the other thing that comes out of reading the record next to the buildings.

Building	Municipal catalogue	The institution that owns it	Sagrada Família booklet
Casa Vicens	1878	1883-1885	1883-1885
Palau Güell	1885-89	1886-1890	1886-1888
Casa Calvet	1898-1900	—	1898-1899
Teresianes	1888; 1889-94	—	1888-1889
Casa Batlló	1904-06	1904-1906	1904-1906
Casa Milà	1906-10	1906-1912	1906-1912

Casa Batlló is the only row where everybody agrees.

Some of this is honest: a date can be the project, the licence, the first stone, the topping out or the certificate, and different institutions pick different moments. Casa Vicens at 1878 is probably the first drawings; Casa Milà at 1906-10 is probably the building being substantially up before the certificate of 31 October 1912.

But “probably” is not a source, and the useful takeaway for anybody reading a Gaudí page anywhere — ours included — is that a confident single date is a choice somebody made and did not tell you about.

What to do with the list

Nothing, mostly. It is not a better itinerary; it is a wider one, and most of the entries reward five minutes rather than a morning.

What it is good for is calibration. The Gaudí you can see in Barcelona is not seven buildings with ticket offices. It is those, plus gates, lamps, a fountain, a shade house, a school façade and a parish interior at the end of a metro line — and the tourist map keeps the ones with a turnstile.

The version of that map with the free ones marked is every Gaudí building in Barcelona. The men who built the ones on this page are in the workshop. The three that are not in Catalonia at all are in Gaudí outside Barcelona. And if you would rather have one good day than a long list, Gaudí in one day is the shortest defensible route.

The one we do run

Our Gaudí walk is ninety minutes on the pavement outside the Sagrada Família with an actor playing Antoni Gaudí, fifteen people, no admission to anything. He is not a neutral witness about his own catalogue entry, and he says so.

Two of the entries above are worth more than a paragraph each, and they have one thing in common that nobody mentions: both were formally put to UNESCO in 2005 and both were left out. Casa Calvet and Bellesguard.