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

Description

Cardedeu – 2 hour tour, including a stop in an Art Nouveau café:

Walking in the city you will discover the architecture for the summer houses in Cardedeu. By visiting three interiors of houses and gardens, you will get the feeling of how life was there more than a Century ago. Also, you will admire some houses from outside, and special places like a flower shop and a modernist cosy café.

La Garriga – 2 hour tour, including lunch in an Art Nouveau restaurant:

In La Garriga, a thermal village with several hot springs, you will have a complete visit in two private homes. In both cases we will visit the interior of the houses, and in one of the cases its garden too. Also, you will have exclusive access to a garden of a very special building. Overall, this private itinerary is a very exclusive visit that will let us imagine how bourgeoise from Barcelona spent summer time more than a Century ago. Also, we will admire several Art Nouveau houses from outside.

In the same village, you will have lunch in a living-room of a Luxurious Art Nouveau building overlooking the botanical garden and enjoying its environment surrounded by charm and nature. Art Nouveau lovers will love the decoration of this place, composed of handmade stained glass, furniture by Gaspar Homar, Busquets or Majorel, to say some. As an alternative, you can also go to eat in the restaurant of a thermal hotel or the old village casino. They are not so “Art Nouveau” but food is also good there.

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.