Modernista Walk, part one

When bourgeois Barcelona spread into the Eixample in the late 19th century, it did so with style and plenty of do-re-mi, converting Cerdà’s formal grid (in spite of its original egalitarian intentions) into a glittering showcase for the era’s greatest Modernista architects and craftsmen. They made the Eixample into a colourful allsorts of a quarter, where mansions prickle with pointy towers or rest on waves of froth like giant cream cakes.

The successful entrepreneurs who commissioned the houses saw them as monuments to their personal occupations and preoccupations, with a charming bravura that only the most fey post-Modernist architects attempt today. In those less discreet times, wives and daughters would sit in the elegant glassed-in tribunas provided by the architects to show off the latest fashions to the passing crowds and offer the ladies of the house ring-side seats to watch the comings and goings in the street.