Antic Hospital de la Santa Creu & La Capella

© Olivia Rutherford / Time Out

Antic Hospital de la Santa Creu & La Capella review Rate it

This was one of Europe's earliest medical centres. There was a hospital on the site as early as 1024, but in the 15th century it expanded to centralise all the city's hospitals and sanatoriums (with the exception of the Santa Margarida leper colony, which remained outside the city walls). By the 1920s, it was hopelessly overstretched, and its medical facilities were moved uptown to the Hospital Sant Pau. One of the last patients was Gaudí, who died here in 1926; it was also where Picasso painted one of his first important pictures, Dead Woman (1903).

The buildings combine a 15th-century Gothic core with Baroque and classical additions. They're now given over to cultural institutions, among them the Massana Arts School, a neighbourhood library, the Catalan National Library (the second largest in Spain), the Institute of Catalan Studies and the Royal Academy of Medicine, which hosts occasional concerts. Highlights include a neo-classical lecture theatre complete with revolving marble dissection table (open 10am-2pm Mon-Fri), and the entrance hall of the Casa de Convalescència, tiled with lovely Baroque ceramic murals telling the story of St Paul; one features an artery-squirting decapitation scene. La Capella, the hospital chapel, was rescued from a sad fate as a warehouse and sensitively converted into an exhibition space for contemporary art. The courtyard is a popular spot for reading or eating lunch.