Barcelona (Catalonia)
No architect has ever stamped a city quite the way Antoni Gaudí stamped Barcelona. More than a century after he worked, his buildings still feel like nothing else on earth: stone that ripples and melts, columns that branch like trees, roofs that shimmer with broken tile, and a sense throughout that nature, not the ruler, set the lines. To wander the city is to keep turning corners into his imagination, and a day spent following his masterpieces is one of the great pleasures of any trip to Spain.
The towering heart of it all is the Sagrada Família, the basilica Gaudí devoted the last decades of his life to and which is still rising today, more than a hundred years after his death. From the street its honeyed spires climb in a tangle of carved facades, but the wonder waits inside, where a forest of soaring columns spreads into branching vaults overhead and the light pours through walls of stained glass, cool blues and greens on one side, warm reds and golds on the other, so that the whole interior glows like the inside of a jewel.
Up on a hillside above the city, Park Güell trades the basilica's grandeur for pure playfulness: a long serpentine bench faced in shimmering broken-tile mosaic, gingerbread gatehouses that look lifted from a fairy tale, and a terrace with the rooftops of Barcelona spread out below. Back down in the elegant heart of the city, the rippling facades of Casa Batlló and La Pedrera curve along the Passeig de Gràcia, their balconies like masks and their stonework flowing like waves, the last word in Gaudí's wild and joyful vision.
