Casa Batlló
Gaudí reskinned a townhouse into a slain dragon, down to columns shaped like leg bones.
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A 1904-06 Gaudí remodel with almost no straight line in it — the facade shifts golden-orange to greenish-blue in broken-tile mosaic and colored glass discs, and reads as a coded Saint George legend.
What to look for
- The central light well's blue tiles run most intense at the top and more opaque toward the bottom — a trick to spread daylight evenly down the shaft.
- Ground-floor sandstone columns mimic the bones of a limb, and the lip-like stone around the windows earned it the nickname House of Yawns.
- The scaled roofline is a dragon's back; the turret cross is meant to be Saint George's lance driven into it.
Passeig de Gràcia 43, one of four rival facades on the Block of Discord (Illa de la Discòrdia); UNESCO-listed since 2005 — book a timed ticket.
Casa Batlló is one of 39 sights worth the detour in Barcelona, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Barcelona pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Barcelona
- Sagrada FamíliaGaudí is buried beneath a church begun in 1882 and still unfinished — one that in 2025 became the world's tallest.
- Camp NouThe bowl that once crammed 120,000 people in to watch Barça — European football's biggest room.
- Park GüellGaudí's failed luxury subdivision — 2 of 60 planned homes ever built — that Barcelona inherited as a mosaic playground.
- Casa Milà (La Pedrera)Gaudí's last private house looks like a wind-carved sea cliff parked on a city corner.
- Barcelona CathedralThirteen white geese live in the cloister — one for each year Saint Eulalia was alive before Rome killed her.
- Palau de la Música CatalanaA glass dome the color of the sun dips into the hall like an upside-down bowl of light.