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
Because 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.
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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