My Unique Favorite Place
When I was a kid, I did my primary education and my high school education in a Spanish school located in Colombia. In 2014, a year before my graduation, my school took all the students of my class, including me, to Spain to celebrate that we had come so far in our education, and we were about to finish it. There, we visited different places like Burgos, Seville, Granada, Madrid, etc., but the place that caught most of my attention was in Barcelona, and it was the “Casa Batlló” or the “Batlló’s House” designed by Antoni Gaudí. It is a unique place that amazed me, and I have not seen something similar elsewhere.
Antoni Gaudí was a modern Spanish architect that lived in Catalonia between 1852 to 1926. His work was influenced by nature, religion and other architectural works; his most famous work is the church of the “Sagrada Familia,” located in Barcelona, too. According to Casa Batlló, Gaudí re-designed the home of Josep Batlló, a very important textile businessman of that moment, in 1904. In the 1950s, the Batlló’s moved out of the house and sold it to a company; which sold the “Batlló’s House” to its current owners in the 1990s. Since 1995, the Bernat Family opened the doors of their famous property to the public allowing everybody to come and see this magnificent building.
In Barcelona, when you are walking through the street “Paseo de Gracia”, you will find a very particular house different from the others, the Batlló’s house. Some people said that to build Batlo’s house, Gaudí was inspired by nature and the battle of Saint George and the dragon, a Christian medieval legend. The “Casa Batlló” is a seven-floor building with its façade’s walls being a collage of ceramics set in fragments of colored glass. On the top, there is a curvy roof with multicolor ceramic tiles that resembles the scales of a reptile or a dragon being slayed by Saint George’s sword, represented by a chimney. From the sixth floor to the third floor are some unique balconies that simulate the shape of a skull. On the second floor, a big window is located with the purpose of illuminating the main room. In front of the window are some columns featuring bones joined together by plants, and on the first floor is the entrance to the building.
As soon as you cross the entrance, you will find a white corridor that will take you to the patio, where you will find the stairs to go anywhere in the house, and a little wooden room where the stairs to the second floor are located. It is said that Josep Batlló used to live with his family on the second floor and the rest of the floors were to rent to other people. The wooden room was his family’s and his entrance to his house, while the stairs of the patio were the entrance for the other tenants of the house. I went to the little wooden room, where I walked up some stairs that are supposed to represent the spine of the dragon, and it has a railing that adapts to the movement of your hand. When you are on the second floor, you will see some windows on the ceiling that will remind you of the shell of a sea turtle; also, there you will have to choose between going to the right or to the left path. I took the right path that guided me to a room where you will see a fire place with the shape of a mushroom, and a door that connects with the main room which is the living room. The living room is facing the street, and it is illuminated by the giant windows that we saw outside. At the top of the windows are some stained panes with colorful disks that resemble underwater life; for example, jellyfish or crustacean shells, that will dampen the sunlight of the room. In addition to these huge windows, in the living room we can see a blue twisted ceiling that will suggest the swirling of water, a very common event in the sea. After crossing the living room, you will find a hall that will take you to some now empty rooms where the Batlló’s family used to live in, and the main patio where you will find the stairs to the other floors.
The main patio provides natural illumination, heat and air ventilation to all the house, and it is inspired by the ocean. The patio is designed with colored ceramic tiles of different shades of blue in order to maintain equal illumination at different heights. Darker blues are located close to a crystal ceiling, where the sunlight goes through; while lighter shades of blue are positioned closer to the lower levels, where the sunlight is weaker. Also, in the patio are stairs that will take you to the rest of the floors, and on the stairs, we will find some faded glass that if you look through, you will perceive that you are in the sea, thanks to the blue tiles that formed the patio.
The third, fourth and fifth floor are organized like the second floor, a big living room facing the street, where the family joined together, and on the back are other ordinary rooms. On the third floor, the only thing that is different from the other floors; is that there is an exhibition of the original furniture that used to be in the house, furniture that Gaudí himself made with the purpose that everything in the house was related to its design; for example: chairs and tables that as the design of the house are curvy and twisted. The sixth floor is a completely white room, to give a sense of cleanliness, where you will find building facilities such as laundry, fire wood, etc. As on the other floors, this floor has a huge room located on the front of the house; what makes this room different from the ones of the other levels is the function it has. On the other floors, that big room was the living room, but on this floor the function of this wide room was to act as a thermal regulator that was to protect the lower levels from the changing temperatures of the outside. In addition, something that made the sixth floor different is that it has bent arches on the ceiling that resemble the ribs of an animal, in this case of a dragon. At the rear of the sixth floor, there are stairs to the seventh floor, where there is just a terrace. On the terrace you can find some chimneys and you can see the scale-roof from a better point of view.
I did my best to describe the “Casa Batlló”, but my words are so unfair to the reality of the house. This house is a magnificent work of art made by a genius; I was fascinated by the house just by being outside, but after I went in, I was in shock. Antoni Gaudí wanted to tell a story with his work, and he succeeded. As soon as you leave the house you will feel that you just left a different land. It is amazing to see every single detail in each room, and it is surprising to think that Gaudí wanted to keep everything connected down to the details of making the furniture match the homes architecture.
The “Casa Batlló” is one of the most unique places in this whole world, and it is the first step to admire the brilliantness of Gaudí; after that you will want to see more of his work like the church “Sagrada Familia” and the park “Park Güell’, both in Barcelona, that as well as the Batlló’s House, will leave you speechless. I would go back to the “Casa Batlló” in a heartbeat, and I completely recommend everybody to go and see it. When I went, they just gave me an audio guide, but fortunately they have progressed and now when you go to the Batlló’s house they will give you an audio guide and a smart guide where you can look through the screen and see how the house was decorated, how the atmosphere was in that room, how the furniture was located and Gaudí’s inspiration at the time to design every single room. If you cannot go, then you can go to their official webpage and take a virtual tour for free to see how it is, but the experience will always be better if you go to Barcelona and you see it in your own flesh.
