Bellesguard
Modernist tower built over a medieval royal residence, crowned with a symbolic Catalan cross and a three-dimensional stained-glass rose window.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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