Park Güell audio guide,
five stops, free.

Stand on the pavement of Carrer d'Olot and face the wall. It is rough stone from this hillside, 210 metres of it, between two and four metres high, capped with tile in white and red bands. Set into that capping are the medallions, fifteen of them, each 1.4 metres across, spelling out two words over and over: Park, and Güell.

That first word is English on purpose. Eusebi Güell, the industrialist who paid for all this, wanted to recreate the British residential parks, and he named the place to say so. What you are standing outside was never meant to be a public park. It was a private housing estate for well-off families, some sixty triangular plots on a bare, rocky slope that people called the Muntanya Pelada, the bald mountain. The rules were strict. Only a sixth of any plot could be built on, and every house had to sit where it would not block a neighbour's sunlight or view of the sea. Güell gave the job to Antoni Gaudí, and work began in October 1900.

Now look over the gate at the two pavilions. This was the estate's porter's lodge, and it was among the first things finished: a description published on the fourth of January 1903 already lists both pavilions, the outer wall and the great stairway behind them as built. The one on the left was the lodge proper, with a waiting room and a telephone booth. Its tower is the chequered one in blue and white, crowned by the four-armed cross Gaudí liked to aim at the points of the compass. That cross was destroyed in 1936 and put back after the Civil War. The pavilion on the right was the porter's own house, the Casa del Guarda, and the cupola on its roof is a mushroom, most likely a fly agaric. The ribs under the cap are coffee cups, set upside down among the tiles.

That is the method of the whole park, and it has a name: trencadís, Catalan for broken up. Much of it was factory rejects and broken cups and plates.

Then the gate, its ironwork shaped like palm leaves. It is Gaudí's, but it came from Casa Vicens, one of his earliest houses, and was fitted in 1965. His own plan for this entrance was stranger: a monumental gate with a pair of mechanical gazelles that would swing open with the doors. They were never built.

Nor was most of the estate. Buyers did not come, and in 1914 the works stopped with two houses standing out of sixty. Everything past this gate was built for residents who never arrived.

Step in among the columns and give yourself a moment in the shade. You are inside the thing that holds up the square: eighty-six fluted columns, each 6.16 metres tall and 1.2 metres thick, carrying a ceiling of shallow white domes. The room was meant to be the estate's market, a covered place for the residents to shop. When the estate failed, the market idea was dropped.

The columns are Doric, or they pretend to be. Look at the block on top of any one of them. On a proper Doric column it is square; here it is octagonal. And look at the outer ring, the columns nearest the stairway. They lean. Classical architecture would call that a mistake. The park's own description puts it better: the tilt runs against the rules of classical composition while making you feel the weight they carry. They are not marble, either. They are mortar and rubble made to look like it, with a skin of broken tile up to 1.8 metres.

They are also drainpipes. The square above you is left unpaved on purpose, so rain soaks straight through it, and inside the colonnade a conduit gathers the water and sends it down to a tank under your feet. That is the tank whose overflow you just saw coming out of the dragon.

Now look up. The plan called for ninety columns. Gaudí left four out, and in the four holes in the ceiling he put four great round medallions, three metres across. They are suns with twenty points, and they stand for the seasons. Around them, in the centres of the smaller vaults, are fourteen roundels about a metre across, full of whirls, helices and spirals. Those are the phases of the moon. Where columns are missing, the space opens into what reads as three naves, like a church.

The man who made that ceiling was Josep Maria Jujol, born in Tarragona in 1879, twenty-seven years younger than Gaudí, and the most inventive of all his collaborators. He worked with him on Casa Batlló and Casa Milà as well. Up there he worked in ceramic shards and plain waste material. If you want a single place in the park where you can see one assistant's imagination running loose inside his master's structure, it is this ceiling.

The park's own history dates it early: by 1907 the square above was already being used for events, which it takes to mean this hall had its roof by then. The medallions have needed care since, and they appear on the park's own list of conservation projects. Stand under the nearest sun for a moment before you go on. Somebody chose every one of those shards.

You have left the bright square behind through an iron gate, and the light changes at once. Salvador Dalí said the ironwork of that gate looked like calf's livers. Keep that in mind and look back at it later.

In front of you is a gallery of rough stone that curls over your head like a wave about to break. It runs for 83 metres against a retaining wall, and it is held up by a double colonnade whose inner columns lean against the slope. The park itself calls it one of the finest examples of Gaudí's organic architecture, and the point is that the lean is doing work. These columns are buttresses. They hold the hillside back. Some writers see a Romanesque cloister in it, perhaps modelled on the one at Elne cathedral; here, though, the portico's own curved inner wall leans to follow the natural slope of the ground.

The stone is left unworked, just as on the viaducts that carry the roads around the park, which Gaudí built of rock taken from the site itself. That is why the whole thing seems to have grown here rather than been built. He kept to that idea wherever he could: the trees already on the land, the carobs and olives, were left standing, and what he planted new were Mediterranean species that needed little water.

Now find the figure. Among the columns, one is carved as a woman with a bundle on her head, a washerwoman carrying the tools of her trade. The portico is named after her. Her model is argued over. Some scholars think Gaudí was quoting a famous ancient Egyptian statuette in the Louvre, the Offering Bearer. Standing here, you can see why.

Now look where the path leads. It runs above the old gardens of Casa Larrard, the country house that stood on this land before the park and that Güell took as his own home in 1907. He lived there until he died in 1918, and since 1931 it has been a school. At the far end the portico turns into a spiral ramp on twisted columns that winds down towards the house, the same structural idea wound into a corkscrew.

Stand close to the washerwoman and look up past her head. She is carrying the same weight as every other column in the row.