Palau Macaya

This guide to Palau Macaya in Barcelona starts with a small stone joke above the carriage entrance, a man pedaling a bicycle, carved by Eusebi Arnau as a portrait of the architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch, caught cycling between building sites in the late 1890s. It follows the cotton merchant Roma Macaya, who bought land on the new Passeig de Sant Joan in 1899 and wanted a palace rather than a house, and traces the building through its finish in 1901, the Macaya family's departure in 1914, and its stint housing an institute for deaf, blind, and mute children.