Palau de la Música Catalana

In the room

The experience

The Palau was built between 1905 and 1908 for the Orfeó Català, the choral society founded in 1891, and paid for by the Barcelona bourgeoisie who wanted a Catalan house for Catalan music. Its architect was Lluís Domènech i Montaner, not Gaudí, and the difference matters: where Gaudí bends stone, Domènech lets glass, mosaic and iron do the talking. It opened on 9 February 1908 on a cramped corner of Sant Pere, which is why the façade comes at you sideways and the surprise is kept for inside.

Inside, the hall is the only auditorium in Europe lit by daylight alone during the day. Antoni Rigalt's stained-glass skylight hangs over the stalls as an inverted dome, gold at the centre and blue around it, a sun in a sky. Behind the stage eighteen young women step out of the wall, their upper bodies carved by Eusebi Arnau, their skirts in Lluís Bru's mosaic, each with a different instrument; everybody calls them the muses. The room seats about 2,200 and above half a million people a year come to hear it.

Oscar Tusquets and Carles Díaz restored and extended the building between 1982 and 1989, and in 2004 added the Petit Palau, a 538-seat chamber hall eleven metres below the square, so the big room could be left alone. UNESCO listed the Palau, with the Hospital de Sant Pau, in 1997.