Bellesguard

This guide to Bellesguard in Barcelona opens in 1900, when Jaume Figueras and his wife María Sagués Molíns hired Antoni Gaudí to build them a summer house on a hillside ruin, and traces his growing fixation on the site's earlier occupant, the medieval king Martí the Humane, who lived out his final years there and once sheltered a fugitive pope. Over nine years Gaudí layered the house with symbols: a crown-topped Catalan cross, a stained-glass rose window nicknamed the Star of Venus, and a rebuilt defensive wall. Watch for the crown on the spire and consider what the design says about its occupant, past and present.