After more than a century, Antoni Gaudí’s original design for Casa Batlló’s rear facade and a private courtyard has been meticulously restored to its 1906 splendour. The €3.5 million investment represents a watershed moment – for the first time since Gaudí last touched these surfaces, the spaces have been returned to their authentic state. Generations of accumulated changes and the slow creep of time had gradually erased some of the architect’s radical vision.
What’s emerged from beneath the layers is startling in its freshness. The hidden colours and forms feel almost subversive in their modernity, challenging our assumptions about how turn-of-the-century architecture should appear.
It’s as if we’ve been handed a key to Gaudí’s private creative world – one that had been locked away for 118 years. Painstaking research uncovered Gaudí’s original colour palette, hidden beneath layers of paint, while master artisans faithfully reconstructed lost elements, including the courtyard’s parabolic heather pergola and ornamental planters. The team, led by architect Xavier Villanueva, employed both traditional craftsmanship and cutting-edge technology—from hand-laying 85,000 Nolla mosaic tiles to using 3D scanning for pinpoint accuracy.
“When the stratigraphic tests revealed Gaudí’s colours, it was like discovering buried treasure,” Villanueva recalls. The restoration also revealed previously unknown architectural innovations, including a remarkable spiral brick-and-iron structure that supports the balconies—a nod to Gaudí’s engineering genius.
This achievement continues a legacy of stewardship that began in the 1990s under Nina Bernat, whose early conservation efforts secured Casa Batlló’s designation as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Today, under the leadership of CEO Gary Gautier, the project forms part of a comprehensive five-year conservation program celebrating the site’s 20th anniversary as a World Heritage property.
The impact extends beyond preservation. Casa Batlló has documented every step of the process through films and interactive features, inviting global audiences behind the scenes of heritage conservation. Last year’s figures speak volumes: €65 million in revenue and nearly two million visitors, with the Asian markets showing robust growth. This is despite protests from locals who feel they are being priced out of the property market by Airbnb tourists. The numbers confirm what we’ve long known: when heritage meets bold innovation, the world takes notice. Now, as work begins on the third floor’s historic family quarters (backed by €1 million in funding), fresh discoveries await.
This is not a static museum. Casa Batlló breathes, evolves, and surprises, creating a dialogue between Gaudí’s genius and contemporary conservation. Here, every restored tile and revealed pigment invites us to see Modernisme with new eyes.