Casa Batlló

The story

In 1900 the Passeig de Gràcia was where the new rich of Barcelona showed what they had. Each family hired a fashionable architect and tried to outdo the neighbours. Three of the showiest houses stand on one block, by the three best architects of the day, and the block got a nickname: the Block of Discord. In Spanish the word for block also means apple.

The textile maker Josep Batlló bought number 43 in 1903. The stepped gable next door had just gone up, and he wanted something that would beat it. In China this is the reign of Guangxu, near the end of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912).

Close by, with a page of its own: Casa Milà, Park Güell, Sagrada Família.

What is here

One building, sold in levels. Check the roof before you buy.

If you have one minute

On the pavement across the street

Start at the bottom. The ground floor and the big window above it are framed in pale stone, shaped like bones with joints. Locals called it the House of Bones.

Go up. The balconies are iron, cast in one piece, with two holes like eyes. Some see masks, some see skulls.

The wall between them ripples. It is covered with bits of coloured glass and about three hundred round ceramic plates, more of them towards the top, so the colour deepens as you look up. Come back at different hours: it changes with the light like water.

Now the roof. It humps like a spine and is tiled in scales that shade from green to blue to pink. On the left a small tower ends in a cross with four arms. The story everyone tells is that this is the dragon, and the tower is the lance of Saint George, the patron of Catalonia, driven into its back.

Things people often get wrong

"Gaudí built it." He rebuilt it. The house of 1877 is still inside: the same floors, the same party walls. He added a floor, a new front and back, a new stair and a new roof.

"Gaudí said it was Saint George and the dragon." He left no word about what it means. The reading is old and it fits. It is still a reading.

"A ticket shows you the whole house." Since January 2025 the basic ticket has not included the roof. Read what each ticket covers before you pay.

"The colours are paint." Outside, they are glass and glazed ceramic set in lime mortar.

People who stood here

• Josep Batlló and Amàlia Godó (textile maker and his wife)He owned mills; she came from the family that owned Barcelona's leading newspaper. They gave Gaudí a free hand, lived on the first floor with five children and let the flats above. Their descendants kept the house until the 1950s.
• Antoni Gaudí (Catalan architect, 1852–1926; the builder of the Sagrada Família)He was fifty-two. He made no full drawings. He stood on the pavement opposite and called up to the men on the scaffold where to put each colour.
• Josep Maria Jujol (architect, 1879–1949)Gaudí's young assistant is generally credited with the colours of the front.
• Josep Puig i Cadafalch (architect and politician, 1867–1956)He built the house next door, with the stepped gable, in 1900 for a chocolate maker. Gaudí set his own roof back on that side and stopped it short, so as not to hide his rival's gable.
• Salvador Dalí (Spanish painter, 1904–1989)He wrote that Gaudí had built a house out of the shapes of the sea, a front made of the still water of a lake at dusk.
• Enric Bernat (sweet maker, 1923–2003)He made his fortune from a lollipop on a stick, whose wrapper Dalí designed. His family bought the house in the 1990s, restored it and opened it to visitors in 2002. They still own it.
• Refik Anadol (Turkish-American artist)In May 2022 he projected a moving picture on to the whole front, made by a computer fed with images of the house and the day's weather. Some fifty thousand people filled the street to watch.

Go deeper: seven stops, from the pavement to the roof

Which stops you can enter depends on the ticket. In 2026 the roof needs the second level of ticket, and the family's private rooms the third.

1. Three houses, one block

Stand back far enough to see the neighbours. At the corner is a house crowned with a little temple, by Domènech i Montaner. Next to Gaudí's is the stepped gable of Puig i Cadafalch. All three are from the same six years. None looks like the others, and none looks like anything else in Europe.

The same shot: the classic picture of the front is taken from the central strip of the avenue directly opposite, at dusk, when the lights inside come on behind the coloured glass. Use the widest lens you have.

2. The stair

The family's stair rises from a hall with skylights shaped like turtle shells. The handrail is carved oak, and it twists up like the backbone of an animal.

Look at the doors. Each has a letter in gold, not a number, and the handles were shaped by squeezing clay in the hand.

3. The great room

The main room looks down on the avenue through one enormous window. The lower panes slide up with counterweights. The upper ones are discs of coloured glass. From here the family could watch everyone who passed, and be watched.

The ceiling turns in a spiral round the lamp, like water going down a drain. There is not one right angle in the room.

In the room behind, look for the drops that seem to have splashed on the ceiling.

4. The well of light

This is the cleverest thing in the house. Old apartment blocks had a dark shaft in the middle. Gaudí widened it, roofed it with glass and tiled it in blue.

Look carefully. The tiles are deep blue at the top, where the light is strong, and pale at the bottom, where it is weak. The windows do the opposite: small at the top, large at the bottom. So every floor gets about the same light, and from below the whole shaft looks one even colour.

5. The loft

Under the roof was the servants' floor, with the washing rooms. It is a run of sixty white arches, each the curve a hanging chain makes, turned upside down. Walking through it is like walking inside the ribs of a whale.

6. The roof

Up here you can touch the scales. Behind the hump is a room that held the water tanks.

The chimneys stand in four groups, twenty-seven in all, twisted so the wind will not blow the smoke back down, and covered with broken tile.

The tower carries the initials of Jesus, Mary and Joseph in gold.

7. The back

The back of the house faces the inside of the block. Its balconies have iron rails like nets, and the top is a crest of broken tile in a pattern of flowers. A restoration finished in 2025 uncovered its first colours, which were darker than anyone remembered.