Raspall Modernisme near Barcelona

Art Nouveau summer houses of the Barcelona bourgeoise (8h)

At the beginning of the 20th century, as soon as the good weather arrived in Barcelona, the wealthiest families of the capital moved to these villages in the countryside. Doctors, lawyers and industrialists needed new residences to live during the hottest months of the year.

These two villages grew thanks to the impulse of these colonies of holiday makers, who built magnificent Modernist style towers, with leafy gardens, which are today a testimonial of an era.

The colony of the bourgeoisie holiday makers was a different group in the life of the municipalities: they dressed mainly in white -with umbrellas, hats, fans and sunglasses-, met at the Casino and organized dances, parties, theatrical sessions, literary evenings, and concerts.

This private tour is a proposal to discover this thought-out and summer-style architecture: from houses and towers surrounded by gardens to parks, fountains and urban designs.

Discover hidden gems of Catalan Art Nouveau booking this Exclusive and Unique private tour for small groups!

The rise of Cardedeu and La Garriga
The current heritage and structure of the two villages are marked decisively for the summer months. The arrival of summerers represented a drastic change in the urban landscape of the municipality and also in the social landscape. The traces of urbanism and the architecture of these years are present in the whole villages.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the convergence of a series of natural values and occult circumstances turned these villages into one of the main focuses of a new social phenomenon: summer. The families of the bourgeoisie of Barcelona and other Catalan cities, enriched with the benefits of the Industrial Revolution, chose the region to escape during the summer months of the contaminated airspace of the metropolis and to compete in opulence with the construction of splendid towers in the villas of La Garriga and Cardedeu.

The city-garden urban movement was born in England of the nineteenth century as a hygienist reaction against the serious deterioration of living conditions as a result of the Industrial Revolution. A few decades later, the model served as an inspiration for the expansions that had to be projected in Cardedeu and La Garriga to respond to the demand for land to build summer houses for wealthy families. This was how the “torre” was born, a symbol of the second residence in Catalonia.

Art, architecture and nature come together in the summer architecture of the late nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth century. Eclectic, Modernist and Noucentist buildings coexist in a nice landscape.

Raspall, the Art Nouveau architect of the area
Son of a man of Barcelona and a woman from La Garriga, Manuel Joaquim Raspall i Mayol (Barcelona, ​​1877 – La Garriga, 1937) was the municipal architect of the councils of La Garriga and Cardedeu, to which he devoted all his career. He is the author of more than 760 projects in three decades of activity, from houses and towers surrounded by gardens, to the civil architecture with parks, fountains and urban designs. Almost 60% of them disappeared under the excavators, most of them during the 1970s.

Raspall combined modernist elements and Viennese models, creating numerous variants of the house with four winds with terraces at different levels, vertical elements, such as the towers-lookout, ceramics and mosaic that provided colour and a special sensitivity to the forge with abundance of a “coup de fouet”, characteristic of modernist buildings.