Gaudí took a sober apartment block and turned its face into bone, water and scale. Barcelona calls it the house of bones.
At a glance
On the Passeig de Gràcia, Casa Batlló is the most theatrical of Gaudí’s city houses. Between 1904 and 1906 he remodelled an existing 1877 building for the textile industrialist Josep Batlló, and left almost no straight line behind. The facade ripples in blue-green trencadís mosaic; the balconies read as masks or skulls; the roof arches like the spine of a dragon. It belongs to the UNESCO listing of Gaudí’s works and is today a museum.
Key facts
- Remodelled: 1904–1906, by Antoni Gaudí
- Original building: 1877, redesigned for Josep Batlló
- Location: Passeig de Gràcia 43, in the Illa de la Discòrdia
- Nicknames: Casa dels ossos — the house of bones
- Status: UNESCO World Heritage; open as a museum
- Style: Catalan Modernisme at its most organic
History
The building was already standing, an ordinary block of 1877, when Josep Batlló bought it and gave Gaudí an unusual brief: he was free to demolish it. Gaudí kept the structure and transformed it instead, working between 1904 and 1906 with collaborators including Josep Maria Jujol, who is credited with much of the colour.
The house entered the modern imagination slowly and then all at once. In 2005 it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage inscription of Gaudí’s works, and it now draws visitors year-round as one of the most recognisable buildings in Europe.
What you see
Everything curves. The lower facade rests on bone-like columns; the windows above lose their frames in soft stone; iron balconies hover like carnival masks. Across the whole front, broken ceramic and glass scatter a blue-to-gold shimmer that changes with the hour. It is ornament, but it is also structure — Gaudí rarely separated the two.
The roof is the punchline. Its scaled, arched ridge is usually read as the back of a dragon, with a turret and cross for the lance of Saint George — Sant Jordi, Catalonia’s patron. Inside, the light-well shifts from deep blue at the top to pale at the base, so the colour reads as even from every floor.
Practical information
- Access: open daily as a museum; timed tickets, busy in high season — book ahead.
- Best light: late morning, when the sun is full on the Passeig de Gràcia facade.
- Time needed: 60–90 minutes for the full visit.
Nearby
- Part of Barcelona — Capital of Catalan Modernisme.
- The Illa de la Discòrdia — Casa Amatller (Puig i Cadafalch) and Casa Lleó Morera (Domènech i Montaner) on the same block.
- Casa Milà (La Pedrera), a short walk up the Passeig de Gràcia.
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage List: Works of Antoni Gaudí.
- Wikipedia (English): Casa Batlló, Antoni Gaudí.
- Coordinates: 41.3916, 2.1649 (Passeig de Gràcia 43).
More photographs
Gallery
More views — angles and details, photographed by Luigi De Marchi.
Gallery
Find it on the map
See this place and what’s around it →Record researched and written by Luigi De Marchi for Cultural Heritage Online, 2026.
📷 Become a Cultural Heritage Online photographer
Share your photos of places: they stay published under your name as the author. The more they're seen, the more you get noticed — and soon a contest will reward the most appreciated photos.
Log in or sign up free to add a photoRequest to use these images
Each photograph is offered by the person who took it — the seller is the photographer named on the image; Cultural Heritage Online runs the payment and delivers the file on their behalf. Buying gives you the right to use the image in your own project — a website, an article, a presentation — with the file and a written licence. Read the Terms of Sale.
What you receive. The file as it is held in our archive: the photographer's own original, without the Cultural Heritage Online watermark, unretouched and not enlarged. This is a working archive built over many years by many people, so the files differ — some were taken recently, others years ago with the equipment of their time. Older pictures are usually smaller: a camera from fifteen or twenty years ago simply recorded fewer pixels than a phone does today, so the resolution is lower and the print comes out smaller. We say so rather than hide it. The size, weight, format and year of each one are printed below it, and the print size is given at 300 dpi. Nothing is upscaled to make a number look better. Where the picture on this page has been cropped for the layout, the file you receive is the full frame, which may be wider or taller than what you see here.
Casa Batlló — Coloured glass and the modelled stone of the windows.
Photo: Luigi De Marchi
€3.00
843 × 1500 px · JPG · 378.7 KB
prints 7 × 13 cm at 300 dpi · taken 2026
Casa Batlló — The dragon-back roof and the turret crowned with a cross.
Photo: Luigi De Marchi
€3.00
843 × 1500 px · JPG · 473.1 KB
prints 7 × 13 cm at 300 dpi · taken 2026
Casa Batlló — The undulating stone columns and trencadís mosaic in detail.
Photo: Luigi De Marchi
€3.00
843 × 1500 px · JPG · 698.8 KB
prints 7 × 13 cm at 300 dpi · taken 2026
Casa Batlló — The full façade by day, with the scaled roof above.
Photo: Luigi De Marchi
€3.00
843 × 1500 px · JPG · 629.0 KB
prints 7 × 13 cm at 300 dpi · taken 2026
Casa Batlló, Barcelona
Photo: Luigi De Marchi
€3.00
2200 × 1237 px · JPG · 1.1 MB
prints 19 × 10 cm at 300 dpi · taken 2026
Is this page about you?
This page is read by travellers and heritage enthusiasts who find it on Google. Tell us how you are connected to this place and we will take it from there.