The smoking room
Arabesque walls under a muqarnas-style ceiling — Gaudí's most purely Eastern room.
Canaan — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Txllxt TxllxT — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Txllxt TxllxT — CC BY-SA 4.0 · FrDr — CC BY-SA 4.0
Casa Vicens is the absolute beginning: the first house Gaudí ever built (1883-85), a thirty-year-old detonating his era's rules with a summer villa like a palace from the Thousand and One Nights — green-and-white chequered tiling, domes and screened balconies, and orange marigolds carpeting the façades in ceramic. The inspiration is openly Eastern: Andalusi Mudéjar architecture and Islamic arts speak in every corner — muqarnas-like ceilings, a smoking room in full arabesque, palm-leaf ironwork at the gates. For an Arab visitor this is the Gaudí house closest to home: you watch him start from our visual world before inventing his own. A private residence until 2017, it opened after exquisite restoration — Gaudí's most recently revealed jewel and his least crowded, in the lovely neighbourhood of Gràcia near Park Güell.
Arabesque walls under a muqarnas-style ceiling — Gaudí's most purely Eastern room.
Green, white and ceramic marigolds — an unforgettable façade.
Andalusi architecture as the key to Gaudí's first house — our roots in his.
Carrer de les Carolines 20-26, 08012 Barcelona
Park GüellPark Güell is Gaudí in the open air: a garden-city venture that failed commercia14 minutes walk4.3
Casa de les PunxesA modernista apartment block on the corner of Avinguda Diagonal, on its own tria16 minutes walk4.3
Casa Milà (La Pedrera)Casa Milà — "La Pedrera", the quarry, as contemporaries mocked it — is Gaudí's l16 minutes walk4.7
Passeig de GràciaThe main avenue of the Eixample, at once Barcelona's most expensive shopping str20 minutes walk4.8
Museu Egipci de BarcelonaThe Museu Egipci de Barcelona is a private collection before it is a public muse20 minutes walk4.4Because Gaudí began from our world: Vicens is built on Mudéjar architecture — Spain's Andalusi Islamic inheritance — with its screens, arabesques and domes. Walking it, you watch Europe's most famous genius learning from our arts before soaring into his own tongue — a story his other houses don't tell.
The ideal third or fourth stop: after the Sagrada and one of the two great houses, Vicens gives you the origin and the calm together — its crowds a fraction of theirs. Lovers of Andalusi history might rank it above all.
Park Güell in the morning, then walk down into Gràcia: Vicens at its heart, the quarter's squares and cafés for lunch — a half-day joining Gaudí's most famous and most hidden through the city's loveliest local neighbourhood.