Part of Park Güell is free, and nobody will tell you where the line is

The question people actually type is whether they can get into Park Güell without paying. The answer is yes, partly, and the part you get is not the part in the photographs. That much is easy.

What is not easy is finding out where the boundary runs, and this page is mostly about that, because we could not do it and we think you should know before you climb the hill.

Two areas, and the city says so

Barcelona’s own Park Güell site, run by the municipal services company, has a page explaining why the entrances are regulated. It sets it out in two lines:

The monumental area, declared as a World Heritage Site, which covers 12 hectares. The adjacent woodland area covering 8 more hectares.

So: a ticketed twelve, and a free eight next to it. The free eight is woodland. There is a second confirmation buried in the rules for dogs, of all places, which say animals may be let off the lead “in the woodland area of Park Güell (outside the regulated area)”.

That is the whole of the good news, and it is real. Eight hectares of Aleppo pine on a hillside above Gràcia, with the city underneath it, costing nothing.

And then the numbers stop agreeing

Three pages on the same official site give three different sizes for the same park, and a fourth institution gives a fourth.

• The frequently asked questions say: “Park Güell occupies 12 hectares.”
• The World Heritage page says: “Park Güell covers a total of 12 hectares.”
• The access-regulation page says 12 monumental plus 8 woodland.
• The page about the surroundings says the park “has a total surface area of 19 hectares, the equivalent of 19 Eixample city blocks”.

And the Sagrada Família’s own information booklet on Gaudí’s works, describing the same estate, says it was “on 15 hectares”, meant to hold sixty plots.

Twelve, twenty, nineteen, fifteen. Our best reading is that 12 is the regulated area, that the fifteen is the extent of the original estate rather than of the park today, and that the other figures are the whole hill with a rounding somewhere. But that is a reading, not a source, and this site does not publish readings as facts. If you want the precise perimeter of what you can walk for nothing, we cannot give it to you and neither, as far as we can find, can anybody else in writing.

What we can tell you is which side of the line the famous things are on, because that the city does spell out.

The second gate, which is the useful thing on this page

The ticket does not put you straight in front of the mosaic bench. There is another control after it. The city’s wording:

There are parts of the park with a high concentration of visitors. These are found within the section that has a second controlled access point, where visitors follow a one-way route and are likely to have to wait to visit them.

And then the list: Nature Square — the terrace with the undulating bench — the Hypostyle Room, the Laundry Room Portico, the Dragon Stairway and the Austria Gardens.

Read that again as a visitor rather than as an administrator. Everything anyone has ever shown you a picture of is behind a second gate, on a one-way route, with a queue that the operator itself expects. That is not a complaint; a hillside taking 1,400 people an hour at its cap has to move them somehow. But it changes what you are buying, and it is on a page nobody reads.

The corollary is that the free woodland is not a lesser version of the ticketed area. It is a different activity. Up there you can stop, turn round, sit down and go back the way you came, none of which is true on the one-way route.

Four more things the official pages say and the resellers do not

The ticket has your name on it. It is “named, personal and non-transferable”, the name must match your identity document, and the park says that document may be requested at the entrances. Once the booking is processed the name cannot be changed and the booking cannot be cancelled. So the ticket a stranger offers you outside the gate is worth nothing, and neither is the one your friend cannot use.

Half an hour of grace, then nothing. Reservations are held for thirty minutes after the time on them.

You cannot go back in. Stay as long as you like; leave once and you are out. Which matters if you were planning to eat somewhere and come back for the light.

The house Gaudí lived in is not included. The maps-and-services page says it in one line: tickets do not include access to the Casa Museu Gaudí. It stands inside the park, it is where he lived from 1906 until the year before he died, and it is a separate admission. Of all the things on this page, that is the one we watch people discover at the door.

What the free part is actually like

It is a wood on a slope. Carob and olive underneath, Aleppo pine above, planted mostly in the 1960s on what had been dry-farmed vineyard and orchard on a hill that was called the Muntanya Pelada — the bare mountain — precisely because nothing much grew on it.

The city’s own account of the plantings has a detail we have not been able to stop thinking about: when the council bought the estate, municipal experts counted around 3,300 trees, of which over 2,200 were pines, most of them small. And when the works began in 1900 the diggers turned up the remains of Pleistocene animals — rhinoceros, elephant and deer — which went to the city’s natural sciences museum.

Somebody laid out a garden suburb for the Barcelona bourgeoisie on top of an elephant.

Where the line probably runs, and why we are not drawing it

The named features on the official site — the Three Crosses at 182.30 metres, the three viaducts, the Palm Trees Path, the Trias house, Larrard house — are all listed together under “emblematic features”, with no marking of which are inside the paid perimeter and which are not. There is a zoning map, published as an image on the regulation page, and we are not going to translate a picture into a promise about what you will be charged for.

What we would do, and what we do do: come up from the Carretera del Carmel side, walk the wood first, and decide whether you want the bench once you have seen what the hill is like without it. That order costs nothing and it is reversible. The other order is not.

The rest of the argument

Whether the ticketed part is worth a morning at all is a separate question and we have answered it at length, from the position of people who sell nothing up there: is Park Güell overrated. The short version is that it is the only place in the city where you can see Gaudí working on a landscape rather than on a building, and that this is a better reason to go than the bench.

Two things you will be told on the terrace that do not survive checking — that it was always meant to be a park, and that the bench is Gaudí’s — are dealt with in things you will be told about Gaudí that are not true. The bench was planned by Josep Maria Jujol, and the park’s own pages say so.

If you are up here anyway, you are at the top of Gràcia and most people do not realise it. Down the hill is the neighbourhood, which the city’s visitor survey does not even count as a visited area, and how to get to Gràcia explains why four of the metro stations people send you to are in a different district.

For the rest of what he left in this city, with the free ones marked, there is every Gaudí building in Barcelona. For a day built around it, Gaudí in one day, which puts this hill where it belongs in the timetable — which is not at lunchtime.

The version with no gate at all

Our own Gaudí walk happens on the pavement outside the Sagrada Família, performed by an actor playing Gaudí, and there is no ticket office in it because there is nothing to get into. Ninety minutes, fifteen people. It is not a substitute for standing on that hillside and we would not pretend otherwise. It is the part of Gaudí that is still free to look at, told properly.

Why the hill is shaped the way it is — viaducts as roads, a staircase as a drain, a market hall under the terrace — is the estate that failed.