Parc de Joan Miró

This guide to Parc de Joan Miró in Barcelona opens with the twenty-two-meter sculpture rising from the pool in front of you, and the debate over what it actually shows, a woman and a bird by Miró's own account, though he once titled the piece Lady-Mushroom with a Moon Hat. It then turns to what stood on this ground before the park: Barcelona's municipal slaughterhouse, the Escorxador, cleared away after Francisco Franco's death as the city remade itself. Four architects were handed the site and opened it as one of democratic Barcelona's first great public parks.