History

Reus was repopulated around 1150 by Robert d’Aguiló, and the castellan Bernat de Bell-lloc granted it the title of town on 3 August 1183. The decisive period came much later. Through the eighteenth century Reus grew into the second city of Catalonia and a major centre of liquor production, ranked in trade documents alongside London and Paris. More than thirty vermouth producers once operated here, and that commercial wealth shaped the late nineteenth-century town.

By 1900 the prosperous merchant families of Reus were ready to spend on architecture, and they turned to the leading figure of Catalan Modernisme. Lluís Domènech i Montaner, born in Barcelona in 1849, was a professor and later director at the city’s school of architecture for some forty-five years, a position from which he helped define what Modernisme arquitectònic meant in Catalonia. His writing, including an 1878 article calling for a national architecture, set the intellectual frame; his buildings in Reus put it into stone, brick, ceramic and stained glass.

The Gaudí connection is more emblematic than physical. Antoni Gaudí was born in 1852 in the Reus area and baptised in the town the day after his birth, though the exact birthplace is disputed between Reus and the neighbouring village of Riudoms, his paternal family’s home. Most of his identity documents named Reus, while from 1915 he himself often claimed Riudoms. Either way, he left for Barcelona and built nothing here, so the city honours him through the Gaudí Centre rather than through his own work.