Park Güell is Antoni Gaudí's most theatrical and accessible achievement — a hillside garden complex in the Gràcia district that began life in 1900 as a failed private housing development and ended up as one of the most visited public spaces in Europe. Commissioned by the Catalan industrialist Eusebi Güell, the park was intended to be an English-style garden city for Barcelona's elite. Only two houses were ever built, the project was abandoned in 1914, and the city of Barcelona took it over in 1926 — the same year Gaudí was posthumously declared a national monument after being struck by a tram. What you see today is less a park in any conventional sense and more a living sculpture: a collaboration between Gaudí's organic architectural instincts and the rough, scrubby hillside of the Carmel hill.
Park