Park Güell was a housing estate for sixty families. Two plots sold.

The terrace with the wavy bench is the roof of a market hall. The market was for the residents of a housing estate. The housing estate has two houses in it.

That is Park Güell, and none of it is a secret: the operator publishes the whole thing on its own website, in plain sentences, and almost nobody reads it before going up the hill.

What it was supposed to be

Eusebi Güell bought a large estate — can Muntaner, on the southern slope of the Carmel hill, in the area everybody called the Muntanya Pelada, the bare mountain — and gave Gaudí a brief. Not a park. A development for well-off families.

The plan, in the park’s own words:

Allowance was made for some 60 triangular-shaped plots on the estate, with a complex network of paths, viaducts and steps to cope with the lie of the land.

And a set of rules that tells you exactly what kind of place it was meant to be:

The building conditions were highly restrictive, as only one-sixth of the plot could be built upon and the height and placement of the houses was ordained so that they could not block the view of the sea nor deprive neighbours of sunlight.

A sixth. Five-sixths garden, by covenant, on a hillside above the city, with the sea in front of everybody by law.

Even the name is a marketing decision. The park’s site says it straight: Güell wanted to recreate British residential parks, and for that reason called it Park Güell, in English. The spelling that confuses every visitor is a nineteenth-century property developer borrowing prestige from Hampstead.

How far it got

The construction record is oddly precise, because the architects’ association published a description of the works on 4 January 1903, and the park quotes it. By then, three years in, this was finished:

• the two entrance pavilions
• the main staircase
• the shelter — the waiting space
• the outer wall
• the viaducts
• part of the great esplanade
• and the drainage system

Levelling had begun in October 1900. By 1907 events were being held on the great square, which tells you the market hall beneath it was fully roofed. The ceramic bench around the terrace was completed in 1914.

So: all the infrastructure, all the public works, all the things you photograph. Everything a buyer would need in order to build. And then:

The complex conditions for sale of the plots, under old emphyteutic lease contracts, the lack of a suitable transport system and the highly exclusive character of the development all made it unviable. A lack of buyers led to the works being abandoned in 1914, with only two of the sixty houses envisaged having been built.

Three causes, given together and in that order.

The lease. An emphyteusis is a medieval instrument: the buyer gets long-term use and pays a perpetual rent to the owner, who keeps the underlying title. You would not be buying a plot at Park Güell. You would be entering into a relationship with Eusebi Güell that your grandchildren would inherit.

The transport. In 1900 this was a bare hill above Gràcia with no way up it. Everything about the estate assumed a bourgeoisie that would commute, and there was nothing to commute on. Getting up there is still the awkward part — how to get to Gràcia explains why four of the stations people recommend are not even in the district.

The exclusivity. Sixty families, a sixth of each plot, and rules about your neighbour’s sunlight. The market for that, in Barcelona in 1900, turned out to be one man.

The two plots, and who bought them

The first plot was sold in 1902, to Martí Trias i Domènech, a lawyer — described on one page of the park’s site as a friend of Güell and on another as the Güell family’s lawyer. He had Juli Batllevell build him a villa, between 1903 and 1906.

The park’s page for that house contains the sentence that finishes the story:

This construction… is situated on the only two plots that were ever sold.

Both of them. To him. The Casa Trias is still a private residence and still belongs to the descendants of Trias and his wife Anna Maxenchs, which makes it, quietly, one of the more remarkable pieces of continuity in Barcelona.

The second house was not sold at all — it was bait. The contractor of the works, Josep Pardo i Casanovas, put up a show house to stimulate sales, designed by Francesc Berenguer, Gaudí’s right hand and the man who could not sign his own projects.

Nobody bought it either. In 1906 it was bought by Gaudí’s father, and Gaudí lived in it until 1925, the year before he died. The show house of a failed property development became the architect’s home for nineteen years, and is now the Casa Museu Gaudí — which, as everyone discovers at the gate, is not included in the park ticket.

And a third building that was already there. In 1907 Güell moved into Casa Larrard, the manor house that stood on the estate when he bought it.

The number the site cannot keep straight

Here the park’s own website contradicts itself, and we are not going to smooth it over.

The history page says two of the sixty planned houses were built. The Casa Trias page calls that house one of the three residences built in the park.

The obvious reconciliation is that the third is Casa Larrard, which was standing before the development began and so is not one of the sixty. But the site never says that, and we are not publishing our own arithmetic as though an institution had done it.

The market that never opened

Walk up the dragon staircase and you arrive under a forest of columns. Everybody photographs it. Almost nobody knows what it is, and the park’s page for it is titled with the answer:

The covered space intended to house the weekly market.

Eighty-six fluted columns, inspired by the Doric order, with the outermost ones deliberately leaning outwards. And, running down inside them, the piece of engineering that makes the whole terrace work: a pipe collecting the rainwater that filters down through the square above, feeding a large underground cistern — whose overflow is the mouth of the dragon on the staircase.

The lizard everybody queues to photograph is a drain. It is the visible end of the water system for a market that never had a stallholder.

The ceiling is small domes in the traditional flat-brick technique, with trencadís panels by Josep Maria Jujol set into them — suns, moons, spirals, broken plates. The technique, and what the pieces are really made of, is trencadís.

And the Greek theatre that is not a theatre

The terrace above it — the one with the bench — is officially the Plaça de la Natura, and the park’s page for it is headed the Greek Theatre or Nature Square. Its explanation:

Its original name responded to the fact that it was planned for the holding of large open-air spectacles, which could be seen from the terraces that surround it.

Greek Theatre is what the project documentation called it. It is not an archaeological claim and there is nothing Greek about it.

Two more things from that page. The square is artificial — partly cut into the rock, partly resting on the roof of the market hall — which is the single fact that most changes how the place looks once you know it. And the famous undulating bench is by Jujol, which the park’s own site says, and which is one of the eleven things people are told up there that does not survive checking.

How it stopped being a failure

Eusebi Güell died in 1918, at his house in the park. His heirs offered the estate to the city, and the council agreed to buy it at the plenary session of 26 May 1922. It opened as a municipal park in 1926 — the year Gaudí died.

Then the ordinary municipal business began. The Güell family house became a state school, named after the pedagogue Baldiri Reixac. The ground to the left of the entrance became a nursery for the council’s ornamental flowers. In 1963, thanks to the Amics de Gaudí, Gaudí’s own house opened as a museum.

Recognition came late and in stages: artistic monument in 1969, UNESCO World Heritage in 1984, and a Catalan national cultural asset since 1993.

A footnote for anybody comparing sources: the UNESCO evaluation dates Park Güell 1904-16, where the municipal catalogue, the encyclopedia and the park’s own account all start in 1900. It is the outlier and we cannot explain it.

What this changes about the visit

The shape stops being decorative and starts being infrastructure. The viaducts are roads. The staircase is a drain. The hall is a market. The terrace is its roof. Once you see it as an unfinished suburb rather than as a garden of ideas, everything on the hill has a job.

The empty half makes sense. The eight hectares of pine above the ticketed area are not a lesser part of the park. They are the plots nobody bought.

And the thing worth arguing about is not the bench. Whether the ticketed part earns a morning at all is a separate question, answered at length in is Park Güell overrated, and how much of the hill is free is Park Güell without a ticket.

One last piece of context, since Gaudí’s client is the man in all of this: what Güell’s money was and where the rest of it went is who paid for Gaudí — and the one residential building of his that survives as designed is Palau Güell, given to the public by his youngest daughter in 1945.

Somebody laid out a garden suburb and got a park

Our Gaudí walk takes place down by the Sagrada Família, on the pavement, performed by an actor playing Gaudí. Ninety minutes, fifteen people, no gate.

It does not go up to the hill. But the hill reads very differently once you know that everything on it was built for sixty families who never arrived.