Torre Bellesguard

This medieval past, as the home of the last count-king of Catalonia, is what inspired Antoni Gaudí. The architect built a structure fraught with symbolism, halfway between Modernisme and Gothic, in which he told the story of Martin I the Humane, the events which took place at Bellesguard in the last years of his life, and the misfortune of the monarch and of his kingdom on his death without issue. 

The project commissioned to Gaudí by Jaume Figueras comprised not only the house but rather a complete monumental complex. It included the reconstruction of the wall surrounding the estate, the restoration and consolidation of the remnants of the old medieval palace, and the construction of the viaduct, where Gaudí’s experimentation began with the columned portico, which reached its culmination in the Portico of the Washerwoman at Güell Park.

In this project Gaudí devised some all-new elements, such as the rose window in the centre of the main façade, called the Star of Venus, a unique example of a three-dimensional stained glass window. Its symbolic significance reveals the architect’s knowledge of history and his wish to establish a dialogue between the present (the house) and the past (the medieval remnants) by setting the respective doors opposite each other, in the purest style of the Renaissance man which he was. 

At the same time, Gaudí reinterprets himself at Bellesguard, where one sees a large number of structural, building and ornamental solutions which already appeared in his earlier buildings or which were soon to appear in projects of the period of 1900-1910, surely the most productive stage of his career.