In 1971 a piece of La Pedrera fell into the street

He died on 10 June 1926, three days after being knocked down by a tram, and the funeral procession went from Barcelona’s cathedral to the unfinished basilica, where he is buried in the crypt.

This page is about the hundred years that followed, told through the buildings rather than the reputation. It is not a story of steady, deserved appreciation. There is a long stretch in the middle where the record is bad, and knowing about it changes how you look at what is standing.

1926-1936: the first thing that happened was somebody redecorating

Rosario Segimon, who owned La Pedrera and had never liked what Gaudí did to her flat, waited until he was dead and then had 532.50 square metres of his suspended ceilings demolished. She brought in a decorator, had the parquet lifted and the shutters taken out, and replaced twenty doors and windows.

The measurement is from the building’s own history. It is precise because somebody at the time wrote down how much of him they were removing.

Meanwhile Domènec Sugranyes, who had taken over the basilica, completed the three towers on the Nativity façade that Gaudí had not lived to see finished — he saw one, the tower of Saint Barnabas, in 1925. In 1927 the architect Quintana put on a homage exhibition at the Sala Parés. In 1929 the first shops opened on La Pedrera’s ground floor.

1936-1939: the fire, and what the buildings were used for

The basilica’s own timeline for 1936 is one line long and it is the most consequential sentence in Gaudí’s posthumous history:

Plans and photographs are burnt and the plaster models, smashed.

La Pedrera was seized and spent much of the war as the headquarters of departments of the Republican Government. The episcopal palace at Astorga was used as barracks and as offices of the Falange.

Work at the basilica resumed in 1939 from what could be salvaged from the workshop and reconstructed from plans and photographs that had already been printed. Which means: everything built since is downstream of a salvage operation, and the honest sentence about the building is neither “they follow his plans” nor “they ignore him”. Why it takes this long picks that up as constraints rather than excuses.

1944: a man spends years gluing plaster

The step almost nobody names.

From 1944, Francesc de Paula Quintana i Vidal — Gaudí’s collaborator, Sugranyes’s successor — reorganised the temple board and, in the Catalan encyclopedia’s phrase, recomposed the plaster models destroyed in 1936.

The basilica’s own booklet says the workshop method “made it possible to reconstruct some of the models that were damaged during the Spanish Civil War”, and the word some is doing real work in that sentence. What is going up now stands on the fragments one team could reassemble. Who they were is in the workshop.

1945: the first rescue

Mercè Güell i López, Eusebi Güell’s youngest daughter, gave Palau Güell to Barcelona Provincial Council on condition that it be preserved and used for culture.

That donation is the reason the only completed Gaudí home in original condition is in original condition — the whole case is here. Park Güell had already been rescued the same way, earlier: Güell died in 1918, his heirs offered the estate to the city, and the council agreed to buy it on 26 May 1922.

1946-1976: the bad stretch

Then it gets ugly, and almost all of the evidence comes from one building, because that building publishes its own bad news.

1946. Segimon sells La Pedrera to a property company.

1953. The architect F. J. Barba Corsini builds fourteen short-stay apartments in the attic — inside the catenary arches — with furniture of his own design.

The grilles. La Pedrera’s semi-basement had twenty-nine iron grilles across its openings. They disappeared when the coal bunkers were converted into shops. Four survive. Three are in the garden of the Gaudí House Museum. One is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York: it had ended up with an American collector, went to MoMA’s Gaudí exhibition, and a few years later joined the collection.

1971. A large piece of stone falls from the first floor into Passeig de Gràcia. The building’s own history draws the conclusion without softening it: the lack of conservation was clear.

1976. Part of the garage opens as a shopping centre — the Pedrera Market — with fifty boutiques: leather goods, perfume, records, souvenirs, a garden centre.

Hold that against the queue outside it today.

1956-1969: the people who turned it round

1956. The first exhibition dedicated to Gaudí, promoted by the association Amics de Gaudí and curated by J. M. Sostres, Oriol Bohigas and Joan Prats, with large-format photographs by Català-Roca. Among the objects on show: three of La Pedrera’s ground-floor grilles.

1962. On 30 October La Pedrera is entered in the Catalogue of Historical and Artistic Heritage of the City of Barcelona — which its own pages note was the first inventory drawn up in Spain for the conservation of a city’s monuments.

1963. Amics de Gaudí open the house he lived in as the Gaudí House Museum.

1964. Astorga opens as the Museum of the Ways.

1969. The year everything gets listed at once, and you can watch it happen from four separate institutions that have never compared notes. On 20 August 1969 the Spanish government registers La Pedrera together with fifteen other works by Gaudí as a historic-artistic monument of national interest. Bellesguard is declared on 24 July 1969. Park Güell is recognised the same year. So is the Nau Gaudí in Mataró, at the other end of his career.

Forty-three years after his death, and thirteen years after three men put on an exhibition.

1984 onwards: the part everybody knows

2 November 1984: Park Güell, Palau Güell and Casa Milà declared World Heritage.

December 1986: Caixa Catalunya buys La Pedrera “after years of neglect” and begins to restore it; the main floor reopens as an exhibition hall in 1992, the old garage becomes an auditorium, and the restoration finishes in June 1996.

1995: the Bernat family open Casa Batlló to the public; cultural tours from 2002, the International Gaudí Year.

2005: UNESCO extends the listing to Casa Vicens, Casa Batlló, the Nativity façade and crypt, and the Colònia Güell crypt.

2017: Casa Vicens opens to the public for the first time in its life — is it worth it.

2019: the basilica finally gets a building licence, 130-odd years after applying.

One thing we are being careful about

The Sagrada Família’s booklet records that a cause for Gaudí’s beatification was promoted and that the canonisation process was opened by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in Rome in 2003.

We report that because the basilica does. A cause being opened is a procedural step; it is not a declaration about the man and it is certainly not a verdict on his architecture. We have previously had to retract a claim on this site that put words about the basilica into the mouth of the Holy See, and we are not going near that again. What Rome has actually published about him that we can point at is a decree of April 2025, and all it records is a birth date, a death date and the word probably in front of Reus. It says nothing about the building. If somebody tells you otherwise, ask them for the document — it is linked below.

What the century actually shows

Not that genius wins in the end. That buildings survive when a small number of people do specific things: a daughter attaches a condition to a gift, a council votes to buy a hillside, three curators hang an exhibition, an architect spends years with a bag of broken plaster, a savings bank writes a cheque.

In between those, the record is a stone falling into the street and fifty boutiques in the garage.

The things that got lost along the way, and the ones that never had a ticket office to protect them, are in the city’s own Gaudí list. What is standing now, with the free ones marked, is every Gaudí building in Barcelona. And the stories about him that do not survive checking are in Gaudí myths.

The version told by the man himself

Our Gaudí walk is ninety minutes outside the basilica with an actor playing Antoni Gaudí, fifteen people, no ticket to anything. He does not know any of what is on this page, which is the point of him. Everything after 1926 is ours to carry.

What happened to the man rather than the buildings — the decree of April 2025, the word it uses and the word the basilica uses — is Gaudí and the Church.