History

The institutional story begins in 1401, when six small medieval hospitals merged to form the Hospital de la Santa Creu. Construction on the original complex in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter started that same year and was completed by 1450; a Casa Convalescència was added in the seventeenth century. By the late nineteenth century, Barcelona’s rapid industrial growth had overwhelmed the medieval facility. The banker Pau Gil left a legacy to fund a new hospital on a generous plot in the expanding Eixample, and the name Sant Pau was appended in his honour.

Domènech i Montaner received the commission and began work in 1902 on a design that broke radically with the regimented hospital corridors of the era. He proposed 48 separate pavilions, each dedicated to a different medical function, connected underground so that patients could recover in daylight and garden air rather than in shared wards. He oversaw construction until his death in 1923. His son Pere Domènech i Roura continued from 1914 onward, completing the ensemble by 1930 with somewhat simpler, more eclectic forms.

The hospital operated continuously through the twentieth century, earning the St. George’s Cross from the Generalitat de Catalunya in 1991. A modern replacement building opened to the north in 2003, and the modernista complex ceased hospital operations in June 2009. The €100 million restoration that followed involved more than 30 specialist teams; it was substantially complete by 2014 and fully finished by 2020, with structural reinforcement, removal of later accretions, and meticulous restoration of the ornamental surfaces guided by historical archive research.