Barcelona keeps its art in the buildings themselves. Three days here run from Romanesque apses rescued from mountain chapels to Gaudí's first commission, Tàpies' wire clouds and a Catalan playhouse built inside a workers' co-operative.
Five medieval merchant palaces hold 4,251 works — the deepest collection anywhere of Picasso's Barcelona years, plus the complete 58-canvas Las Meninas series he painted in Cannes in 1957. Doors open 10:00.
Domènech i Montaner's 1885 brick-and-iron publishing house, crowned by Tàpies' tangled wire sculpture Núvol i Cadira. Inside are 800 works by Catalonia's great postwar abstractionist plus rotating shows. Tue–Sun 10:00–19:00.
Gaudí's first house (1883–85), a Moorish-tiled explosion of marigolds and palm fronds on a quiet Gràcia street. It opened to the public only in 2017 after 130 private years; the smoking room's papier-mâché muqarnas ceiling is extraordinary.
Domènech i Montaner's 1902–30 hospital: 27 pavilions of mosaic, stained glass and Eusebi Arnau sculpture, linked by underground tunnels and built on the theory that beauty heals. It treated patients until 2009.
The Palau Nacional holds the planet's finest Romanesque fresco collection — whole apses lifted off Pyrenean church walls in the 1920s, including the Pantocrator of Sant Climent de Taüll. Modernisme and Gaudí furniture upstairs.
Puig i Cadafalch's 1911 Casaramona textile mill — modernista brick battlements and not a single chimney — converted into an arts centre, with Arata Isozaki's glass-and-steel entrance sunk beneath the courtyard. Three halls of rotating shows.
Richard Meier's white 1995 cube dropped into the Raval, holding some 5,000 works of Catalan and international art made since 1945 — Tàpies, Muntadas, Dora García. The CCCB next door shares the same courtyard.
Domènech i Montaner's 1908 hall is the only auditorium in Europe lit entirely by daylight, with an inverted stained-glass sun dropping from the ceiling and Wagner's Valkyries riding out of the proscenium.
Gràcia's 1893 iron market, restored by Gaudí's collaborator Francesc Berenguer, still feeds the barri rather than the tourists. Mon–Fri 08:00–20:00, Sat to 15:00, closed Sunday; the bar counters serve breakfast from opening.
Gràcia was an independent town until 1897 and still behaves like one: nine linked squares, an 1864 bell tower that once rang the barricades, and Carrer Verdi's Cines Verdi screening everything in its original language.
An 18th-century wool factory in Poblenou, gutted and rebuilt in raw concrete by BAAS Arquitectes in 2009, now hanging some 300 Catalan paintings made from the 1960s onward. Tue–Sat 11:00–18:00, Sun 11:00–14:00.
The home of contemporary Catalan playwriting, housed since 2016 in the old Pau i Justícia workers' co-operative, where Flores & Prats left the salvaged doors, tiles and mouldings visibly reassembled into the new building.